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You forgot the ./configure step which is the hard part. For all but the most trivial of software this step is likely to fail, and often fail big and crypticall

You forgot the ./configure step which is the hard part. For all but the most trivial of software this step is likely to fail, and often fail big and cryptically. Then you get to figure out what packages to install from your distro's repos to fix all these errors. It's even more fun when that dependency was never packaged for your distro, because then you get to install that dependency from source and repeat this entire process. Oh, and I hope there's never a security update for any software you install from outside of the repos, because you'll never remember to update it until you need a newer version for some other reason.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> For all but the most trivial of software this step is likely to fail, and often fail big and cryptically. Then you get to figure out what packages to install from your distro's repos to fix all these errors. In my experience, the vast majority of the time the installation instructions list the necessary packages for at least Debian-style and Redhat-style distros. Build instructions for Windows tend to be much worse. though if the software supports Windows at all, you are slightly more likely to have an installer or at least precompiled binary because build tooling availability and build experience is so much worse on Windows.