That's not the reason why Linux software doesn't usually have manuals though. The reason for that is that the developers don't want to write them. They won't even comment their code. So they sure as hell aren't going to write hundreds of pages of documents about how to use it. It's not like they are getting paid to do something they don't like. So they don't do it and if non-expert users cannot figure out how to use the software who cares. It's not like they are getting paid.
Found the shill. Never heard of a manpage, huh? Linux is one of the most well documented operating systems in the world. You are an imbecile.
Have you ever actually used Linux? It isn't reading a man page for a system command that is the problem. It is figuring out how to use some software package that expects people to learn how to use it by reading their source code.
Some of the best Linux software has almost no documentation at all and certainly not enough for non-experts to figure out how to use it. Most of the time they assume the readers of the docs are experts and are not really shy about admitting that either.
It takes a long time for the worst software company in the world, Microsoft, to get things right. It is only when their software is reaching EOL that it gets decent. It isn't a fear of change on the part of the users that is the problem. It is that Microsoft is evil and incompetent and should probably be destroyed in a large explosion.
Debian Testing I hope you mean because Debian Stable means all of your software will be years out of date and probably buggy and unreliable. When you go to the developer for help with your problem he will be like, "Dude I fixed that bug 2 1/2 years ago. What are you doing with that ancient version?" And he will have an excellent point. I guess you could just compile everything from source though like a Gentoo user.
Well that is not quite true. Incomplete you say? Well so are the Linux ones. Even the most complete ones like the Ubuntu repos lack certain basic mainstream software like the Eclipse IDE for instance. There is a ppa I think if you are running Ubuntu but only for the Java version. I needed the C++ version. And for niche or obscure software you are compiling from source and often without complete build instructions and extremely minimal documentation on how to use the software as well.
Try this with Eclipse IDE for C++ in Ubuntu please and get back to me. A lot of software packages are not available in the repositories. He already said the package was not available in the repos. The system only works 'perfectly' if you use a rolling distro like Arch Linux or Debian Testing and even then the package has to actually be available..deb files do sometimes work with dpkg -i. So it's certainly worth at least trying if compiling from source without build instructions is your only other option.
Now I would agree that there needs to be some improvement in documentation but it is VERY rare for an application to have no documentation. Not even a manpage? Which applications?
Well I never said it wasn't rare. It is indeed rare for there to be not even a sentence explaining what the application actually does. Probably less than 1% of Linux apps, but that pretty much never happens with Windows apps. It is so rare that I cannot come up with any examples in the few minutes I have to post this, but they are out there. I have seen lots of examples over the years. Most recently several embedded web servers had zero documentation and I think some gui tools. Usually they are very niche applications and of course obscure. The real problem isn't the nodoc applications. It is that there are so many applications with very bad and ultra-minimal documentation.I would say as many as half the Linux applications I use have what I consider to be inadequate docs and at least 20% have only very minimal documentation.
What? If it is an X application from the repos they almost always install a menu entry.
Really? That hasn't really happened at all with my installation of Xubuntu, but maybe there is something wrong with my installation. I dunno. But I've never run a distro like that. Maybe I should try Fedora sometime if most of the apps install menu entries automatically. I guess I could at least try Kubuntu. I will check out MenuLibre or LXMenuEditor. I have been meaning to look for apps like that. But it shouldn't really be necessary. Linux desperately needs to make software installation a lot easier if it ever wants to get mainstream users.
It is VERY unusually to be expected to source compile and even rarer to not have a basic README giving basic compile instructions. Usually it's as easy as entering into the source directory and:./configure make sudo make install
I don't find it unusual at all. It depends on how obscure the software is, but a lot of the best niche Linux software is only available as source or if you need an up to date version you often have no choice but to compile as I just did with QPDF. I had a similar problem with Eclipse IDE which was not in the Ubuntu repos at all. One of the best things about Linux is the large variety of little software tools available for many different things, but binaries are frequently unavailable for those. The nice thing about Arch Linux which I have used in the past is the AUR often has those little programs and auto-compiles them for you. I think also Arch Linux goes the extra mile in enforcing the sort of strict compilation that you just listed. I wish that always just worked but it frequently does not. And as far as hand editing.desktop files I didn't mean it was hard to figure out how to do it. I just meant it was a long and tedious process. Although I guess it somewhat depends on how fast you can type.
Which one? Perhaps I can help.
appweb and ESP, a web server and MVC framework respectively. I'd really like to be able to use them but I cannot even build them and even if I manage to build them the documentation is so inadequate that I doubt I will be able to get it working. I would like to try though. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also if you are still feeling generous why can I not upgrade qpdf to the latest version by compiling from source? I did./configure, make, make install but it didn't actually install the program. It did build it though and if I go to the 'build' directory I can run it from within that directory only. These sort of little problems happen to me constantly with Linux. Software installation and documentation are just not problems with Windows. Of course Windows has no equivalent to qpdf and anyway I wouldn't want to install Windows on m
You don't really seem to know much about this subject.
That is certainly true, sir. My years of experience with various Linux distros and and my c/c++ programming experience and my degree in Electrical Engineering are not enough qualifications to run Linux. As I keep saying you should also have an IQ of at least 130 and I don't have that anymore unfortunately. So it would be best if I could stick with Windows which just works most of the time and certainly doesn't require any great intelligence to use.
But I have to use Linux to do some things in the same way that some people have to use Windows to do some things. I don't have a choice. I need both OSes. I just wish I were smart enough to be able to figure out the infinitely challenging series of puzzles that is the Linux OS. Must be great to be that smart. I used to be smart enough when I was younger. It was still tedious and difficult and time consuming, but I was smart enough to figure out all of the difficult puzzles.
BTW how can I upgrade QPDF from 8.21 to 8.4 on Xubuntu? Can I do it without compiling the source code? I hope so because 'make install' doesn't seem to actually install anything. The difference between 'upgrade' and 'update' outside of a narrow technical term in Linux is a distinction without a difference btw. The terms are generally used interchangeably as you probably know.
Well right now Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish has version 8.21 of QPDF, but the latest version is 8.4 and there are quite a few bugfixes and other changes between the two versions. I just had to compile version 8.4 from source in order to 'upgrade' but it didn't quite work and I can only run the program from inside of the build directory. I guess I can manually put the build directory in the PATH, but anyway are you saying I could have just done apt qpdf upgrade and it would have automatically upgraded me to 8.40 from 8.21? I didn't even think to try that.
125 is still pretty high compared to most people and I bet you have a technical background. Fedora is actually pretty impressive. A harder distro than Xubuntu which I am using. My IQ is less than 100, but I have many years of programming and Linux experience. So I can manage to run Linux even though I am not really smart enough to manage Linux properly.
I just had to compile an app from scratch which required 2 dependencies and even then I can only run the program from within the 'build' subdirectory. Trying to copy the executable file to usr/local/bin didn't work. Won't run from there.
The appimage that was available also didn't work with certain options and so seems like it won't be reliable in general. The appimage wouldn't run at all at first. It is at least running now and I am not sure how that happened. The app does at least have a thorough and up to date user manual which is like a miracle in the Linux world.
Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish only has qpdf version 8.21 and I need the latest version which is 8.4. There is an appimage but it won't run for me. I don't know why. Yes I did chmod +x on the appimage. Still won't run.
So I downloaded the source tarball. I need to install two libraries as prerequisites: zlib and jpegturbo. Neither was even easy to find in the distros. It turns out the zlib package I need is called zlib1g-dev, but the software home page neglects to mention that. Of course I installed zlibc which is the wrong compression library entirely before googling and googling enough to discover the package I needed.
So ok I can finally do./configure and then make as the qpdf web site instructs, but I already had 8.21 installed. Not sure if that is what caused the problem. The software seemed to compile. So I then did a 'make install' as well and it seemed to do something, but when I enter qpdf --version I still get version 8.21. So it did not upgrade the package.
So I figure maybe I have to remove the old package first. So I do apt purge qpdf. Easy enough. It uninstalled version 8.21. Then I tried 'make install' again. No luck. Now when I type qpdf I just get command not found. So it appears like I am going to have to reinstall version 8.21 again even though I managed to get the software to compile from source *and* there is an appimage available. Have I made my point?
First, was there a specific reason you wanted a newer version? If not, your actions amount to the equivalent of just looking on random websites on the internet and installing whatever program happens to have the highest stated version number
Have you ever written software? If so do your changes generally make it worse or better? Do you release new versions just to put a bigger number at the end of the name?
If there was a specific reason, the next best approach is to try to find the original author's web page or use launchpad to pull in a ppa (personal package archive) which leverages the package manager to deal with dependencies and hopefully provide a lesser degree of immunity from malicious programs.
Only Ubuntu has PPAs and only a small percentage of apps have them and the author's webpage is rarely helpful unless you want to compile from source.
The overall point to be raised, though, is the approach is still insanely better than Windows
Maybe the overall approach is better but that is not what matters. What matters is how well the actual implementations of the approach works and the answer is not very well because software gets so out of date and is quite often not even available in the distro at all anyway. Not that it matters because if it were available it would probably be years out of date.
Yes Microsoft goes way too far in the other direction and assumes you have the IQ of a small monkey. So you have two different extremes and some of those things like extension hiding are just a symptom of the evil maliciousness of Microsoft. They must have made a deal with the devil or something.
And this is the reason some people use Linux. Because they think it shows how intelligent they are and actually it does because no one with an IQ under 130 and at least some technical computer background can actually use Linux. Choosing an OS as a way of boasting about how smart you are. To be fair most people have an IQ less than 130 and really should not be using Linux. At least we should be able to agree on that much.
Please explain how I am magically capable of such things.
I will take a stab at this one. Either you do little to nothing with your Linux installation: just browsing, email, and some text editing or you have an IQ of at least say 135. Just running Linux is a bit like taking an IQ test and anyone with an IQ of 120 or less is going to have very serious problems installing and using it and that means most of our species.
This cannot be stressed enough. I don't want to have to read someone's uncommented source code to figure out how to install, build, run, or just use an app and when they do bother to actually write documentation it generally assumes you have an IQ of 160 and hack assembly language for NASA spaceship computers and have 'been there done that' like a million times already. They generally assume you could have written the software yourself, but have just been too busy. They don't have the slightest clue how to teach anything to anyone and/or they just don't care.
If only Linux devs actually cared enough to do stuff like that the OS would be a lot easier to use. Keep in mind though that the software was often designed to be installed the old way and that it does waste some hard drive space with Windows style installations that can't make use of shared libraries. To get it to really work they may have to redesign the software a bit.
I'm not sure that Snap/Appimage/Flatpak is the answer for Linux. I think a better answer is a Standard Desktop GUI environment. Linux devs need to just bite the bullet and agree on an ironclad standard way to do software installations and menus and launcher icons and all the different Desktop Environments should abide by those rules. The idea that the user should hand edit a.desktop file every time they install an app is just ridiculous. I can barely believe that is still a thing in 2019 Linuxes.
Having said that I don't see why nearly every Linux app cannot have a Snap/Appimage/Flatpak installer as well. Is it really so difficult to make one? It is the nuclear option when other methods don't work.
I have been a Linux user for many years with quite a few different distros and I have to agree with the other guy. I am running Xubuntu right now and nothing 'just works'. A lot of the programs I want to use don't have documentation. Sometimes you have to read the source code even to know what the program is for. In general Linux program documentation is just utter rubbish compared to most Windows programs. They almost always assume that you have the technical expertise of someone who writes compilers for a living.
Very few program installers bother to add menu or desktop launcher entries and it is by no means easy to do that manually. Many programs are from somewhat to very out of date if you try to just do an 'apt install x' and Ubuntu flavours have one of the best software repositories in the Linux world. Really only Arch Linux can compete. So you have to google the program and hope they have a ppa and many don't and even when they do they are sometimes out of date and when you try to install an out of date ppa it screws up the entire software installation system until you fix the problem which is by no means easy or straightforward.
Installing programs on Linux is often like wrestling an alligator naked. It's almost always a massive massive struggle and yes it isn't that unusual for you to be expected to compile from source and without any instructions on how to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and there is a Snap or Appimage or Flatpack which makes the installation more like Windows, sort of automagical when it works which it doesn't always. Frequently such packages cause problems when you actually try to run the program because the program was not originally written with that sort of installation in mind or because the installer hasn't been updated for 3 years.
Overall I like Linux better than Windows, but that is only because Windows sucks so very very badly because Microsoft is one of the worst software companies on the planet. But Windows at least has consistent single click installs that really do almost always just work and when someone bothers to write a Windows program they nearly always at least tell you what the program is supposed to do and very very often even tell you how to install and run it. I hate to say this but I think at least some people who love Linux love it because it is so difficult to use. I think it's kind of an ego thing. Like they want to feel superior to the retardo Window users who would not have a chance in hell of running even the easiest 'desktop' Linux distro. It makes some people feel so very elite, but that's not what an operating system is for.
After the Windows 10 OS-as-Adware debacle I decided to finally make a serious effort at doing everything except gaming in Linux, but the people who write Linux software don't make that easy. So many of them are like, "Uh yeah I wrote this free program (it's free so stfu and don't complain!), but I don't give even the slightest fuck if even a single person besides myself ever uses it. Really. I. Don't. Care! So go read my uncommented source code with 100 different source files if you want to know how to use it or how to install it (compile from source baby!) or even what it is actually for. If you want to know why I wrote it you can go fuck yourself. No really. Go buy commercial software if you don't like it. Oh there is almost never any commercial software for Linux? Then go run Windows if you want documentation." That last bit is my point. Windows developers usually write docs or even manuals (Manuals OMG!).
I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to compile from source a linux web server I really would like to use, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It is a massive puzzle or mystery. And no there isn't a binary available. So I had to just give up. There is however a Windows version available and I am pretty sure installing *that* version of the server would be a piece of cake. I have a Linux server though so that doesn't help me. It is open source and I have the source code so I could presum
Diet is a lot like religion. People believe in it because it gives them comfort to believe they can control what happens to them just by making different choices of what to eat. It probably makes no difference whatsoever what you get calories from. For every theory there is conflicting evidence.
Every time we are certain we understand the perfect diet we find out we were very very wrong. All we know for sure is that if you stop eating you will die, but as for what type of food is 'healthier' or 'better' in some way we still don't really know and it is not hard to see why.
Just look at the posts here. Everyone has a different theory and they are 100% certain that if they just eat a certain way they will have a better, happier, longer life. Just like believing in the right supernatural entity. Paul Theroux wrote about this in his novel Millroy the Magician.
Nothing has changed. People don't want to be powerless. They long for power and pretending that they have power just from what they choose to put in their gob is very reassuring even though there is little to no basis for the warm and fuzzy virtuous feeling they get from 'eating right'. We are omnivores. We evolved over thousands of years eating whatever we could find. Lots of people live long and healthy lives eating whatever tastes good or whatever they can afford without worshipping any particular diet guru.
Most developing countries are located where non-carbon energy sources, particularly solar, are quite practical, and again, they're mostly taking that route and skipping the dirty industrial path the west went through.
I live in a developing 3rd world country and I am not seeing any of this. Citation desperately needed. PV panels are too expensive for most developing countries and how do you store the energy when the sun goes down?
Okay...I am guessing you have never been outside of the US or if you have been it was Canada or the Bahamas. How are you going to convince some guy in Pakistan not to cook with propane when it is the only method he can afford and his kids will starve if he doesn't? You could stick an AK47 in his face, but you'll have to stand there pointing it at him until you both die. Do you see the problem?
You can't enforce zero CO2 emissions without a world police state that makes North Korea seem like an Ayn Rand laissez faire utopia and even then it would be almost impossible except in large cities. The world's population would just spread out more and then go back to burning wood for energy.
We aren't evolving anymore or if we are it is not for the better (see Idiocracy), but god forbid we should try to improve ourselves as a species. Boy wouldn't that be awful. It is too bad that only a tiny percentage of the human population is intelligent and the rest are total retards who are against any sort of change. Just imagine if we could give every baby an IQ of 150 or even 180, but most people would regard that as a horrific dystopia I guess. Totally sad that these people call themselves 'scientists'. This is anti-science.
Put a fork in it because this web site is so done. Look at the responses to this interesting 'special snowflake' hypothesis to explain the only interstellar object we've ever seen. Sigh. This used to be a place where at least some highly intelligent people would post. Not anymore.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How would you feel about having to email your paper to hundreds of special snowflakes who can't go through the normal channels? Maybe if you work in the same field and they know who you are it won't annoy them too much, but even then it's inconsiderate to bother them about it. I guess you could even track down where they live and knock on the door of their house begging them for a copy of their famous paper. Or just wait outside their house in the morning for when you think they are about to go to work and intercept them. "Please please please good sir...I needs your paper...." If you wait outside his every day I am betting that within a few months he will hand you a freshly printed copy just to get rid of you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the reason why Linux software doesn't usually have manuals though. The reason for that is that the developers don't want to write them. They won't even comment their code. So they sure as hell aren't going to write hundreds of pages of documents about how to use it. It's not like they are getting paid to do something they don't like. So they don't do it and if non-expert users cannot figure out how to use the software who cares. It's not like they are getting paid.
Found the shill. Never heard of a manpage, huh? Linux is one of the most well documented operating systems in the world. You are an imbecile.
Have you ever actually used Linux? It isn't reading a man page for a system command that is the problem. It is figuring out how to use some software package that expects people to learn how to use it by reading their source code.
Some of the best Linux software has almost no documentation at all and certainly not enough for non-experts to figure out how to use it. Most of the time they assume the readers of the docs are experts and are not really shy about admitting that either.
It takes a long time for the worst software company in the world, Microsoft, to get things right. It is only when their software is reaching EOL that it gets decent. It isn't a fear of change on the part of the users that is the problem. It is that Microsoft is evil and incompetent and should probably be destroyed in a large explosion.
Debian Testing I hope you mean because Debian Stable means all of your software will be years out of date and probably buggy and unreliable. When you go to the developer for help with your problem he will be like, "Dude I fixed that bug 2 1/2 years ago. What are you doing with that ancient version?" And he will have an excellent point. I guess you could just compile everything from source though like a Gentoo user.
There are absolutely no organized collections.
Well that is not quite true. Incomplete you say? Well so are the Linux ones. Even the most complete ones like the Ubuntu repos lack certain basic mainstream software like the Eclipse IDE for instance. There is a ppa I think if you are running Ubuntu but only for the Java version. I needed the C++ version. And for niche or obscure software you are compiling from source and often without complete build instructions and extremely minimal documentation on how to use the software as well.
Try this with Eclipse IDE for C++ in Ubuntu please and get back to me. A lot of software packages are not available in the repositories. He already said the package was not available in the repos. The system only works 'perfectly' if you use a rolling distro like Arch Linux or Debian Testing and even then the package has to actually be available. .deb files do sometimes work with dpkg -i. So it's certainly worth at least trying if compiling from source without build instructions is your only other option.
Now I would agree that there needs to be some improvement in documentation but it is VERY rare for an application to have no documentation. Not even a manpage? Which applications?
Well I never said it wasn't rare. It is indeed rare for there to be not even a sentence explaining what the application actually does. Probably less than 1% of Linux apps, but that pretty much never happens with Windows apps. It is so rare that I cannot come up with any examples in the few minutes I have to post this, but they are out there. I have seen lots of examples over the years. Most recently several embedded web servers had zero documentation and I think some gui tools. Usually they are very niche applications and of course obscure. The real problem isn't the nodoc applications. It is that there are so many applications with very bad and ultra-minimal documentation.I would say as many as half the Linux applications I use have what I consider to be inadequate docs and at least 20% have only very minimal documentation.
What? If it is an X application from the repos they almost always install a menu entry.
Really? That hasn't really happened at all with my installation of Xubuntu, but maybe there is something wrong with my installation. I dunno. But I've never run a distro like that. Maybe I should try Fedora sometime if most of the apps install menu entries automatically. I guess I could at least try Kubuntu. I will check out MenuLibre or LXMenuEditor. I have been meaning to look for apps like that. But it shouldn't really be necessary. Linux desperately needs to make software installation a lot easier if it ever wants to get mainstream users.
It is VERY unusually to be expected to source compile and even rarer to not have a basic README giving basic compile instructions. Usually it's as easy as entering into the source directory and: ./configure
make
sudo make install
I don't find it unusual at all. It depends on how obscure the software is, but a lot of the best niche Linux software is only available as source or if you need an up to date version you often have no choice but to compile as I just did with QPDF. I had a similar problem with Eclipse IDE which was not in the Ubuntu repos at all. One of the best things about Linux is the large variety of little software tools available for many different things, but binaries are frequently unavailable for those. The nice thing about Arch Linux which I have used in the past is the AUR often has those little programs and auto-compiles them for you. I think also Arch Linux goes the extra mile in enforcing the sort of strict compilation that you just listed. I wish that always just worked but it frequently does not. And as far as hand editing .desktop files I didn't mean it was hard to figure out how to do it. I just meant it was a long and tedious process. Although I guess it somewhat depends on how fast you can type.
Which one? Perhaps I can help.
appweb and ESP, a web server and MVC framework respectively. I'd really like to be able to use them but I cannot even build them and even if I manage to build them the documentation is so inadequate that I doubt I will be able to get it working. I would like to try though. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also if you are still feeling generous why can I not upgrade qpdf to the latest version by compiling from source? I did ./configure, make, make install but it didn't actually install the program. It did build it though and if I go to the 'build' directory I can run it from within that directory only. These sort of little problems happen to me constantly with Linux. Software installation and documentation are just not problems with Windows. Of course Windows has no equivalent to qpdf and anyway I wouldn't want to install Windows on m
You don't really seem to know much about this subject.
That is certainly true, sir. My years of experience with various Linux distros and and my c/c++ programming experience and my degree in Electrical Engineering are not enough qualifications to run Linux. As I keep saying you should also have an IQ of at least 130 and I don't have that anymore unfortunately. So it would be best if I could stick with Windows which just works most of the time and certainly doesn't require any great intelligence to use.
But I have to use Linux to do some things in the same way that some people have to use Windows to do some things. I don't have a choice. I need both OSes. I just wish I were smart enough to be able to figure out the infinitely challenging series of puzzles that is the Linux OS. Must be great to be that smart. I used to be smart enough when I was younger. It was still tedious and difficult and time consuming, but I was smart enough to figure out all of the difficult puzzles.
BTW how can I upgrade QPDF from 8.21 to 8.4 on Xubuntu? Can I do it without compiling the source code? I hope so because 'make install' doesn't seem to actually install anything. The difference between 'upgrade' and 'update' outside of a narrow technical term in Linux is a distinction without a difference btw. The terms are generally used interchangeably as you probably know.
Well right now Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish has version 8.21 of QPDF, but the latest version is 8.4 and there are quite a few bugfixes and other changes between the two versions. I just had to compile version 8.4 from source in order to 'upgrade' but it didn't quite work and I can only run the program from inside of the build directory. I guess I can manually put the build directory in the PATH, but anyway are you saying I could have just done apt qpdf upgrade and it would have automatically upgraded me to 8.40 from 8.21? I didn't even think to try that.
125 is still pretty high compared to most people and I bet you have a technical background. Fedora is actually pretty impressive. A harder distro than Xubuntu which I am using. My IQ is less than 100, but I have many years of programming and Linux experience. So I can manage to run Linux even though I am not really smart enough to manage Linux properly.
I just had to compile an app from scratch which required 2 dependencies and even then I can only run the program from within the 'build' subdirectory. Trying to copy the executable file to usr/local/bin didn't work. Won't run from there.
The appimage that was available also didn't work with certain options and so seems like it won't be reliable in general. The appimage wouldn't run at all at first. It is at least running now and I am not sure how that happened. The app does at least have a thorough and up to date user manual which is like a miracle in the Linux world.
Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish only has qpdf version 8.21 and I need the latest version which is 8.4. There is an appimage but it won't run for me. I don't know why. Yes I did chmod +x on the appimage. Still won't run.
So I downloaded the source tarball. I need to install two libraries as prerequisites: zlib and jpegturbo. Neither was even easy to find in the distros. It turns out the zlib package I need is called zlib1g-dev, but the software home page neglects to mention that. Of course I installed zlibc which is the wrong compression library entirely before googling and googling enough to discover the package I needed.
So ok I can finally do ./configure and then make as the qpdf web site instructs, but I already had 8.21 installed. Not sure if that is what caused the problem. The software seemed to compile. So I then did a 'make install' as well and it seemed to do something, but when I enter qpdf --version I still get version 8.21. So it did not upgrade the package.
So I figure maybe I have to remove the old package first. So I do apt purge qpdf. Easy enough. It uninstalled version 8.21. Then I tried 'make install' again. No luck. Now when I type qpdf I just get command not found. So it appears like I am going to have to reinstall version 8.21 again even though I managed to get the software to compile from source *and* there is an appimage available. Have I made my point?
First, was there a specific reason you wanted a newer version? If not, your actions amount to the equivalent of just looking on random websites on the internet and installing whatever program happens to have the highest stated version number
Have you ever written software? If so do your changes generally make it worse or better? Do you release new versions just to put a bigger number at the end of the name?
If there was a specific reason, the next best approach is to try to find the original author's web page or use launchpad to pull in a ppa (personal package archive) which leverages the package manager to deal with dependencies and hopefully provide a lesser degree of immunity from malicious programs.
Only Ubuntu has PPAs and only a small percentage of apps have them and the author's webpage is rarely helpful unless you want to compile from source.
The overall point to be raised, though, is the approach is still insanely better than Windows
Maybe the overall approach is better but that is not what matters. What matters is how well the actual implementations of the approach works and the answer is not very well because software gets so out of date and is quite often not even available in the distro at all anyway. Not that it matters because if it were available it would probably be years out of date.
Yes Microsoft goes way too far in the other direction and assumes you have the IQ of a small monkey. So you have two different extremes and some of those things like extension hiding are just a symptom of the evil maliciousness of Microsoft. They must have made a deal with the devil or something.
And this is the reason some people use Linux. Because they think it shows how intelligent they are and actually it does because no one with an IQ under 130 and at least some technical computer background can actually use Linux. Choosing an OS as a way of boasting about how smart you are. To be fair most people have an IQ less than 130 and really should not be using Linux. At least we should be able to agree on that much.
Please explain how I am magically capable of such things.
I will take a stab at this one. Either you do little to nothing with your Linux installation: just browsing, email, and some text editing or you have an IQ of at least say 135. Just running Linux is a bit like taking an IQ test and anyone with an IQ of 120 or less is going to have very serious problems installing and using it and that means most of our species.
user documentation sucks donkey dick.
This cannot be stressed enough. I don't want to have to read someone's uncommented source code to figure out how to install, build, run, or just use an app and when they do bother to actually write documentation it generally assumes you have an IQ of 160 and hack assembly language for NASA spaceship computers and have 'been there done that' like a million times already. They generally assume you could have written the software yourself, but have just been too busy. They don't have the slightest clue how to teach anything to anyone and/or they just don't care.
If only Linux devs actually cared enough to do stuff like that the OS would be a lot easier to use. Keep in mind though that the software was often designed to be installed the old way and that it does waste some hard drive space with Windows style installations that can't make use of shared libraries. To get it to really work they may have to redesign the software a bit.
I'm not sure that Snap/Appimage/Flatpak is the answer for Linux. I think a better answer is a Standard Desktop GUI environment. Linux devs need to just bite the bullet and agree on an ironclad standard way to do software installations and menus and launcher icons and all the different Desktop Environments should abide by those rules. The idea that the user should hand edit a .desktop file every time they install an app is just ridiculous. I can barely believe that is still a thing in 2019 Linuxes.
Having said that I don't see why nearly every Linux app cannot have a Snap/Appimage/Flatpak installer as well. Is it really so difficult to make one? It is the nuclear option when other methods don't work.
Oh yeah. Updates. You mean those Debian updates that come every 3 years or the Ubuntu ones that come every 12 months?
I have been a Linux user for many years with quite a few different distros and I have to agree with the other guy. I am running Xubuntu right now and nothing 'just works'. A lot of the programs I want to use don't have documentation. Sometimes you have to read the source code even to know what the program is for. In general Linux program documentation is just utter rubbish compared to most Windows programs. They almost always assume that you have the technical expertise of someone who writes compilers for a living.
Very few program installers bother to add menu or desktop launcher entries and it is by no means easy to do that manually. Many programs are from somewhat to very out of date if you try to just do an 'apt install x' and Ubuntu flavours have one of the best software repositories in the Linux world. Really only Arch Linux can compete. So you have to google the program and hope they have a ppa and many don't and even when they do they are sometimes out of date and when you try to install an out of date ppa it screws up the entire software installation system until you fix the problem which is by no means easy or straightforward.
Installing programs on Linux is often like wrestling an alligator naked. It's almost always a massive massive struggle and yes it isn't that unusual for you to be expected to compile from source and without any instructions on how to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and there is a Snap or Appimage or Flatpack which makes the installation more like Windows, sort of automagical when it works which it doesn't always. Frequently such packages cause problems when you actually try to run the program because the program was not originally written with that sort of installation in mind or because the installer hasn't been updated for 3 years.
Overall I like Linux better than Windows, but that is only because Windows sucks so very very badly because Microsoft is one of the worst software companies on the planet. But Windows at least has consistent single click installs that really do almost always just work and when someone bothers to write a Windows program they nearly always at least tell you what the program is supposed to do and very very often even tell you how to install and run it. I hate to say this but I think at least some people who love Linux love it because it is so difficult to use. I think it's kind of an ego thing. Like they want to feel superior to the retardo Window users who would not have a chance in hell of running even the easiest 'desktop' Linux distro. It makes some people feel so very elite, but that's not what an operating system is for.
After the Windows 10 OS-as-Adware debacle I decided to finally make a serious effort at doing everything except gaming in Linux, but the people who write Linux software don't make that easy. So many of them are like, "Uh yeah I wrote this free program (it's free so stfu and don't complain!), but I don't give even the slightest fuck if even a single person besides myself ever uses it. Really. I. Don't. Care! So go read my uncommented source code with 100 different source files if you want to know how to use it or how to install it (compile from source baby!) or even what it is actually for. If you want to know why I wrote it you can go fuck yourself. No really. Go buy commercial software if you don't like it. Oh there is almost never any commercial software for Linux? Then go run Windows if you want documentation." That last bit is my point. Windows developers usually write docs or even manuals (Manuals OMG!).
I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to compile from source a linux web server I really would like to use, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It is a massive puzzle or mystery. And no there isn't a binary available. So I had to just give up. There is however a Windows version available and I am pretty sure installing *that* version of the server would be a piece of cake. I have a Linux server though so that doesn't help me. It is open source and I have the source code so I could presum
Diet is a lot like religion. People believe in it because it gives them comfort to believe they can control what happens to them just by making different choices of what to eat. It probably makes no difference whatsoever what you get calories from. For every theory there is conflicting evidence.
Every time we are certain we understand the perfect diet we find out we were very very wrong. All we know for sure is that if you stop eating you will die, but as for what type of food is 'healthier' or 'better' in some way we still don't really know and it is not hard to see why.
Just look at the posts here. Everyone has a different theory and they are 100% certain that if they just eat a certain way they will have a better, happier, longer life. Just like believing in the right supernatural entity. Paul Theroux wrote about this in his novel Millroy the Magician.
Nothing has changed. People don't want to be powerless. They long for power and pretending that they have power just from what they choose to put in their gob is very reassuring even though there is little to no basis for the warm and fuzzy virtuous feeling they get from 'eating right'. We are omnivores. We evolved over thousands of years eating whatever we could find. Lots of people live long and healthy lives eating whatever tastes good or whatever they can afford without worshipping any particular diet guru.
Most developing countries are located where non-carbon energy sources, particularly solar, are quite practical, and again, they're mostly taking that route and skipping the dirty industrial path the west went through.
I live in a developing 3rd world country and I am not seeing any of this. Citation desperately needed. PV panels are too expensive for most developing countries and how do you store the energy when the sun goes down?
You mean enforcing laws doesn't work?
Okay...I am guessing you have never been outside of the US or if you have been it was Canada or the Bahamas. How are you going to convince some guy in Pakistan not to cook with propane when it is the only method he can afford and his kids will starve if he doesn't? You could stick an AK47 in his face, but you'll have to stand there pointing it at him until you both die. Do you see the problem?
You can't enforce zero CO2 emissions without a world police state that makes North Korea seem like an Ayn Rand laissez faire utopia and even then it would be almost impossible except in large cities. The world's population would just spread out more and then go back to burning wood for energy.
We aren't evolving anymore or if we are it is not for the better (see Idiocracy), but god forbid we should try to improve ourselves as a species. Boy wouldn't that be awful. It is too bad that only a tiny percentage of the human population is intelligent and the rest are total retards who are against any sort of change. Just imagine if we could give every baby an IQ of 150 or even 180, but most people would regard that as a horrific dystopia I guess. Totally sad that these people call themselves 'scientists'. This is anti-science.
Put a fork in it because this web site is so done. Look at the responses to this interesting 'special snowflake' hypothesis to explain the only interstellar object we've ever seen. Sigh. This used to be a place where at least some highly intelligent people would post. Not anymore.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How would you feel about having to email your paper to hundreds of special snowflakes who can't go through the normal channels? Maybe if you work in the same field and they know who you are it won't annoy them too much, but even then it's inconsiderate to bother them about it. I guess you could even track down where they live and knock on the door of their house begging them for a copy of their famous paper. Or just wait outside their house in the morning for when you think they are about to go to work and intercept them. "Please please please good sir...I needs your paper...." If you wait outside his every day I am betting that within a few months he will hand you a freshly printed copy just to get rid of you.