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It's also useful for people who do have root access to a terminal, remote or otherwise, but want more up-to-date packages. Some packages (my favorite example i
by Zarel 8y ago
It's also useful for people who do have root access to a terminal, remote or otherwise, but want more up-to-date packages.
Some packages (my favorite example is youtube-dl) are useless if they're not up-to-date. And sometimes the new version has a feature that's really important to you.
I'm using it for ripgrep and node, for instance. ripgrep isn't available in apt, and the node version in apt is incredibly outdated.
There's a reason most software these days tells you to curl an installer and pipe it to bash, and that's because distro package managers never have the latest version.
Here's ripgrep's apt installation instructions:
curl -LO https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/releases/download/0.10.0/ripgrep_0.10.0_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i ripgrep_0.10.0_amd64.deb
There's no way I'm memorizing that. I'll have to google 'ripgrep' copy/paste it from the readme each time.
Linuxbrew is just so much easier:
brew install ripgrep
- anothergoogler 8y agoyoutube-dl is on PyPI https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
- Zarel 8y agoNeat! That could be useful in certain situations. In case you're suggesting Linuxbrew is unnecessary (I don't think you are, but just in case), there's definitely something way more convenient about just using Linuxbrew to install everything, than to track down what software is best installed from what repository.
- anothergoogler 8y agoOut of curiosity, for how long have you been using Linux as a daily driver?
- asark 8y agoTo respond to the implied dig, I've spent months to years using the following distros on desktops and laptops, in no particular order: Gentoo, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake So I've had plenty of exposure to three major package management systems and a bunch of distro-managed repos, from the perspective of a desktop user (I've used Linux on the server plenty, too, but that's less directly relevant). I've poked around in a few others in a desktop context—Slackware, Arch, Nix, probably more that I'm forgetting. I also used Macports for over a year. Homebrew's the most pleasant overall solution for managing user-facing desktop software that I've used, by a long shot.
- Zarel 8y agoI use macOS as my daily driver. I've been using CentOS and Ubuntu Server to run my webservers for around twelve years now, which includes a top-1000 website in the US. I used to manually compile things like Node.js and ripgrep from source to get up-to-date versions, but these days I just use Linuxbrew.
- gerdesj 8y agoand that's because distro package managers never have the latest version. I am using Arch - seems pretty up to date: [gerdesj@jglaptop ~]$ aurman -Ss ripgrep community/ripgrep 0.10.0-2 A search tool that combines the usability of ag with the raw speed of grep Thanks for the heads up wrt search tools.
- Zarel 8y agoOh, yeah, I don't personally use Arch, but from what I hear, it isn't an Arch problem at all. I was mostly talking about apt (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and yum (Fedora, CentOS, etc).