I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
    4·
    9 months ago

    How do people not using Debian/Ubuntu follow along with tutorials when their package manager doesn’t have a package that’s in Apt?

    • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
      2·
      9 months ago

      I typically search the package name + fedora, it will probably tell me the alternative package that is in fedora.

      Nowadays, I have moved to an atomic fedora distro, so I would severely limit the amount of package I install on my system for stability and security.

      I think I only have two packages installed on my machine: fish, because it is the only popular shell that follows xdg dir; and a latex-like input method to use in slack.

    • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
      2·
      9 months ago

      Back in my slackware days I’d just convert other distros packages to the tgz format or compile the package and its requirements.

      If the dependencies were really complex I’d draw a picture to help me understand them better.

    • nyan@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      9 months ago

      My first step is usually to figure out whether the package should exist as a separate entity under Gentoo (which, for instance, doesn’t have separate dev packages). Then I check the overlay masterlist to see if there’s an unofficial package (which there often is).

      If there is no package, I can package it myself (since I’ve been working with the same distro for years and can handle the basic packaging cases), install from source, get the .deb and apply alien or deb2targz and proceed from there, or give the whole thing up as a bad job.

    • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I usually look at their GitHub or what have you to see if there are packages or instructions there. I have been able to solve most issues this way. Otherwise I see how much of a bitch it will be to compile from source. Depending what it is, I also check to see if there is a docker image instead.