I hate PPAs, and the entire repo model, because it's just so much overly complicated bullshit for a simple task. And they don't cover everything.
Example: recently I had need of the of the DOSBox debugger, which you need to enable at compilation. On Windows this was as simple as finding some zip file from someone who'd done it and extracting the executable. On my Lubuntu system though, it wasn't in the repo for my version, nor was there a PPA. It was, however, in the very newest repo for Ubuntu and required up to date dependencies and I didn't want to upgrade my perfectly working base system.
Ultimately I had to manually download the package and its dependencies, extract their contents, and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH and the like to get it to run out of a self-contained directory.
That's what's fascinating to me. All the technology is there to distribute portable self-contained applications on Linux, but basically no one does it, or they pull a flatpak and still tie it into the horrifically silly repo model (and still aren't portable!). Only AppImage makes any sense, but hardly anyone embraces it.
Example: recently I had need of the of the DOSBox debugger, which you need to enable at compilation. On Windows this was as simple as finding some zip file from someone who'd done it and extracting the executable. On my Lubuntu system though, it wasn't in the repo for my version, nor was there a PPA. It was, however, in the very newest repo for Ubuntu and required up to date dependencies and I didn't want to upgrade my perfectly working base system.
Ultimately I had to manually download the package and its dependencies, extract their contents, and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH and the like to get it to run out of a self-contained directory.
That's what's fascinating to me. All the technology is there to distribute portable self-contained applications on Linux, but basically no one does it, or they pull a flatpak and still tie it into the horrifically silly repo model (and still aren't portable!). Only AppImage makes any sense, but hardly anyone embraces it.