I’ve been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn’t much before. Here is my assessment.

Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.

There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it’s for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.

  • Kecessa
    6·
    3 months ago

    Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No sudo make install, no curl .. | sudo bash or whatever the readme calls for.

    And that is why Linux isn’t ready for mass adoption.

    I had to fuck around for hours to make my wifi adapter work and everyone was referencing this one project on GitHub and the way to install it and what actually worked was to sudo make install.

    You’re the first person I see that’s saying not to do that, I had to use instructions from the Linux Mint forum to try and get it installed the first time and no one mentioned that, I found alternative projects but none of them had clear instructions “You must have installed X, Y, Z first” without any explanation how to do it.

    So, for new users, Linux is all about blind trust in strangers to make stuff work and if you have no interest in learning programming that’s what your experience will continue to be.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
      1·
      3 months ago

      I guess you had to install lwfinger’s rtw88 backport? If true, then the problem was the outdated kernel used in mint (I guess 1.15.y at the time) should work now out of box with the new kernel update ubuntu (and therefore mint as downstream as well) released some months ago.

      I think, it is 6.2.y now and in 6.2 rtw88 got a massive update.

      • Kecessa
        2·
        3 months ago

        I’m running Mint 22 (the one that just came out) so the kernel shouldn’t have been an issue and it worked with Bazzite (but I had GPU issue with that distro) 🤷

    • acchariya@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      Parsing poorly documented c spaghetti code is not a good vehicle to learn programming anyway though. The root issue here is the fact that interop between open source software and other oss, closed source software, and firmware is a headless beast where each user has to take on the project manager role.