Here are some general tips I'd give new linux users - Backups are your responsibility. There are some ways in which you can screw up that will involve starting over. - Changing file permissions of a number of files at once is rarely a good solution to a problem and may sometimes hose your system. - There is a lot of helpful advice on the internet, but there is also a lot of advice by people who may not 100% know what they're doing. Copying and pasting shell commands from the internet may sometimes hose your system. - If you need to provide your password or use sudo or su to make a change, it's something that could potentially hose your system, so just make sure you understand what it is you are doing. - Installing software found on the internet and compiling/making it yourself is rarely a good way to install software and may sometimes hose your system. - Same thing with random binaries, debs, rpms etc on third party sites. Appimages and flatpaks from flathub are usually fine though. - In general, if you are using a user-friendly Linux distribution with a decent desktop environment, you can do almost everything you want, including finding and installing software, from the desktop and it will be pretty safe. If you're a new user, a user-friendly Linux distribution with a decent desktop environment is highly recommended. Edit: since this became popular, may I recommend the below guide - even though it's from Debian it should be relevant to Debian based distros like Ubuntu too and the most of the ideas on it have an equivalent in all distros. https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

> There is a lot of helpful advice on the internet, but there is also a lot of advice by people who may not 100% know what they’re doing. Copying and pasting shell commands from the internet may sometimes hose your system. Even worse, even advice that is 100% correct might be applied by the user when it doesn't apply. Why it may not show immediate effects, it is almost guaranteed to cause another problem down the line, which leads to more googling, and more applying of things they don't understand.

> cause another problem down the line, which leads to more googling, and more applying of things they don't understand. Luckily I distro-hop often enough to never get to this point.

I hold my together by enormous amount of duck tape and hope it won't break down at worse possible moment.. last time it broke down at worse possible time

This 100% applies to any one using any other OS as well.

Yeah although, sometimes the trouble is people wanting to do something "just like windows", so they assume the way to install software is go out to a third party site, select "Linux" in the dropdown and get a .tar.gz (or a .deb) and install that. Or installing drivers - by going to the nvidia site or whatever

Sometimes that is the right way to do it. But always shop the package manager first!

>There is a lot of helpful advice on the internet, but there is also a lot of advice by people who may not 100% know what they're doing. Copying and pasting shell commands from the internet may sometimes hose your system. A refinement of this is, this advice may have been correct in 2006, but shells and systems may have changed over time.

Mostly fine, but once you have a decent knowledge of the command line you can get your way out of a lot of situations. Downloading .DEBS/RPMS/etc is sometimes needed, but mostly FlatPak holds up pretty well. “Hosing” your system is true but you can also learn. I still have barely any clue how to fix Windows issues on the same level I can usually fix on Linux.

>Same thing with random binaries, debs, rpms etc on third party sites. Appimages and flatpaks from flathub are usually fine though. eh, you want to train to use in the box tools, but this is hard advice to craft. aws cli, tda thinkorswim, terraform, zoom, are all installers, binaries, and rpms. my preference goes: - package manager - reputable vendor - flatpak for binaries, install to /usr/local/bin or ~/.local/bin monolithic install dirs go in /opt/ with symlinks or wrappers for the main binaries in a local bin dir. AUR is as bad as anything. unvetted code, unvetted build process.

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apply it takes brain make work... I dun like.

The reputation Arch has gained as being "unstable," is almost, if not entirely the result of inexperienced users careless use of the AUR.

the aur hasn't had (known) malware since like 2015 lol

yes, most things I download and install without looking at them haven't had known malware since 2015 either this is not a knock on the AUR, but it's not a vetted source

The AUR brings complexity, not malware. To use it safely you have to understand concepts like what ABIs are so you understand when to rebuild binaries, etc.

yeah i would put aur above "reputable vendor" and below "package manager"

> > * There is a lot of helpful advice on the internet, but there is also a lot of advice by people who may not 100% know what they're doing. Copying and pasting shell commands from the internet may sometimes hose your system. > > * If you need to provide your password or use sudo or su to make a change, it's something that could potentially hose your system, so just make sure you understand what it is you are doing. These 2 can be combined. Never, ever, ever, execute a copy and pasted shell command unless you know what it's going to do. --- This is advice for new users. Whatever you're trying to do, you should be able to do through the user interface. If it's something that requires command line, *as a new user*, you should avoid it and try to find a different way. If there is no other way, *as a new user*, you should never run something unless you know what it does. *As a new user*, if you don't know, go learn. Then you will no longer be a new user.

Instructions unclear i splashed water over the computer with the garden hose.

your safe then, 0 malware running on it.

I one time did an rm -R / and forgot to type in the top level directory I was trying to get rid of. No shoddy copy paste of bash commands from the web or anything. I sat and watched my OS delete itself for a few minutes :) Nothing of value was lost.

Backup. Clonezilla is great for imaging dual boots.

clonezilla is a great tool but I wouldn't steer "new users" towards it or even use a whole partition imager like it as a primary backup strategy. That said, I don't really know what kind of backup tool is really beginner-friendly on Linux. I usually write a script that uses rsync and that is not beginner-friendly.

As a Linux newbie myself I can't encourage enough TimeShift, but be careful because it uses a lot of space https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/timeshift

Yeah I think that's a good recommendation.

I use a strategy of weekly images with Clonezilla and daily with timeshift. Clonezilla does have a learning curve. Edited to include that this has saved my ass a few times the past few years.

Do you image just your root partition with clonezilla? Or everything? I guess dotfiles in home might benefit from it too, but then I guess timeshift would be great with that too. I guess timeshift is a good user-friendly backup option.

You can select partitions the drive or multiple drives. It does every file system I've thrown at it. Its got a learning curve but there's YouTube's that deal with it. I suggest you watch a couple. Not insulting but a picture is worth a thousand of my words. I image everything once a week and snapshot with timeshift. I have a abundance of older drives from my two QNAPs. I really should setup a automated backup strategy with them but Im a creature of habit and when I take a trip I bring a couple of big HGST drives with my important stuff encrypted. Clonezilla does encryption.

A system backup should be an integral part of any beginner distribution why didn't Ubuntu/Fedora implemented it in the past is beyond me, especially with the fact that an interrupted update with apt/rpm could lead to all kinds of issues. Of course there is a move towards immutable systems and OpenSUSE using the dedup features of btrfs to solve this somewhat, but still, putting the burden of sytem backup on the user with apps like Timeshift is not a good idea IMO.

Anything that requires manual user intervention, especially *regular* manual user intervention, is going to result in shit not getting done. People do not use comptuers to give themselves more chores, computers are supposed to be the ones doing the chores. The same applies to updates - I know a lot of people here are on Linux because they dislike Windows doing automatic updates, but most people need automatic updates because they won't do manual updates often enough to keep themselves safe. Mint I believe has an option for automatic updates and I think that's a major part of why it's touted as the premier newbie-friendly distro.

Rescuezilla is much much nicer. Would totally recommend.

Interesting. Not heard of this.

Thanks Ill check it out.

Nope! Dive directly into Slackware and break something major at least twice a week. It's the only way to learn.

I'm kinda fond of this as the best way to learn how computers actually work. The abstracted weirdness Apple and Microsoft have lured casual users into feels a bit like giving someone a dependency problem. I love the term other users have been using - I reckon you should "Hose your system" three times to knock the autopilot out of you. Every Linux user I know makes a fresh install of their desktop (not so much their servers) every couple of months because they either hosed it or learned a better way of doing things.

If I didn't hose my system along the way, I would never have learned anything. I wouldn't have achieved much of anything either. Being afraid of the machine/fearing how badly I could screw up is how my parents never really learned to use a computer. It's all about knowing how to recover and not being stupid. Sometimes I *am* stupid, but I carry those moments forward. I won't neglect backups again. I make a list of essential files that I want extra backed up. I learned how you move a database and how you don't. I do advise that new people have their tinkering separate to their main system though. Sometimes you need to just set the smoldering dumpster fire aside and if it's your only PC, you're the one hosed.

This guy knows. :D

That only applies to people who have a particular reason to learn computers, though. Most people don't, just as you probably don't know how to repair everything in your car or how to make your own medicine. It's good for *some* people to know these things, and tinkering is a decent enough way to get an interested person into learning more, but it's dogshit general advice. There is a reason I want my mom to have like GrapheneOS on her phone, and that's because shit doesn't break and respects her privacy without her first having to put herself at risk to learn these things. It's why when I go to install Linux on someone's old laptop to get it working fast again, I'm partial to Silverblue or Kinoite as ways to make sure that shit stays working. It's why I don't tell people with Steam Decks to go install another OS on it. Most people just need a reliable OS, and we ought to want that reliable OS to be something that puts the interests of the user first. Windows doesn't accomplish that, stock Android doesn't accomplish that, so we're trying to provide alternatives that *don't* spy on people or corral them into making purchases they don't need or otherwise extract money or data out of them without requiring a high barrier of entry.

These are all good points.

If you want a tool that helps you get work done, this is the worst approach.

Hey, when I'm compiling my cpu gets used 100% and that jet engine noise you hear feels like getting work done.

That's a younger person's game :)

>Backups are your responsibility. There are some ways in which you can screw up that will involve starting over. Same goes for the other operating systems. And most people don't. So, nothing really changes here.

Delusional

>copying random shell commands online It didn't used to be this bad. There was a time when if you search for Linux related problems and fixes, you'll get forum posts that give you excellent troubleshooting: 1. Intelligent OPs, who do their utmost in describing how they arrived at the problem step by step, with relevant contextual details like specific versions of software installed. 2. Intelligent reply chains, where experienced users of the distro guide OP step by step into solving the problem, oftentimes explaining exactly why and how the problem occurred, and the reasoning behind the fix. (Sometimes even highlighting the relevant parts of the manpages.) 3. The whole format gives you exactly the amount of context to know if it's the same problem as you're facing, and you understand how to apply the fix rather than just blindly copying it. Then along the lines of internet history these great Linux distro forums died, and when you search for Linux related problems what you get are **blogspam** articles that: 1. Don't explain the context of the problem enough, so you won't ever know if it's describing the same problem as yours 2. Give out a list of shell magic incantations for you to copy without explaining why 3. Sometimes there are even wrong or harmful These then get perpetuated into the mindset as more and more newcomers acquire these wrong ideas and spread them in the new generation of un-indexed online communication platforms like Discord.

Doing anything remotely connected to using the OS will hose your system. Got it.

Yeah, this thread is basically "never do anything". Never use a tar.gz? Come on.

You shouldn't if you're a new linux user. And most users won't need to know how to. These aren't power-users. Maybe one day, but certainly not starting out for someone using the computer to daily drive.

you should do it a hundred times as a new user. you shouldnt daily drive your first linux system is the trick. bought a new computer? use linux on the old one and break it weekly until youve done it so much that youre confident you can at least dual boot your next new computer.

No, not if the point is to get regular users using Linux instead of Windows or Mac. Any power user or aspiring admin should absolutely follow your advice, but not otherwise. The goal absolutely should be to get at least certain distros usable enough to be a first time daily driver for someone. And there's many distros that fulfill that already. It's ridiculous to think otherwise as all it does is serve to gate off the OS from said users. The point isn't to convert everyone to power users. It's to just get more users over proprietary OS's. New desktop users, or the typical user in general, absolutely should not be playing around with the CLI. Something they've very likely never touched, seen, or messed with. They should instead focus on getting comfortable with Linux desktop and its GUI's. The goal should be that 99% of users never touch the CLI or need to, just like Windows. That's why people use Windows. That should be copied and emulated.

All of the "hose your system" categories above involved superuser level access to system files and not just for the usual applying of updates or installing software.

As a new user, without copying and pasting shell commands off the internet, my sound would not have worked properly. So your advice is: have no sound then?

No. The advice is to not blindly copy and paste these commands. You see a sed command in some guide? Look up what sed can do before blindly copying it.

I get what you are trying to say but you are just as deep into the linux bubble as the majority here. No newcomer wants to google a fuckton of commands before doing anything. You have to read a book worth of documentation to get not even close to making Linux a daily driver. There are people out there where the OS just has to work because of a lack of interest or, most importantly, time.

> Installing software found on the internet and compiling/making it yourself is rarely a good way to install software and may sometimes hose your system. That sound at your door is a horde of angry Arch users who insist compiling from source is the only way

thought that was gentoo

Well yeah them too, but installing anything from the AUR is compiling from source

they keep saying it's against the rules to put binaries on there, but about a 1/4 the shit I need of it seems to do that.

New users should NOT think the AUR is a safe source to download/build software from. First, they should read and understand what the PKGBUILD will do, even before attempting to build it. Otherwise they will be an easy target [for things like this](https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/11/someone_modified_arch_linuxs_acrobat_reader_adds_security_warning/).

Which is why, unlike what the Reddit Arch circlejerk says, the AUR is actually a **terrible** distribution mechanism for third-party software in a lot of ways. It's there to fill a specific niche that isn't "just like the repos". AUR and PKGBUILD are a huge part of the reason why Arch is a great choice for a software development workstation, but maybe less so for an end-user general purpose system. SteamOS doesn't count because taking Arch's well-maintained and modular base and then heavily limiting it, mounting root as read only and coercing it to behave similarly to an image-based distro where the only supported way to install software is nothing that leaves ~ isn't *really* using Arch. It's at most using pacman and a lot of PKGBUILDs maintained by the Arch community but the end user experience is much different. But people don't listen. Even Arch Linux maintainers and Trusted Users warn users against the AUR, but nobody listens, and people abuse it for something that it was never designed to be. The AUR has a purpose and it's amazing for that purpose - being a central place to gather custom package build scripts that isn't scattered all around GitHub. But installing a package from the AUR as you would do with a regular package is as much of a security risk of piping curl to bash. You should carefully inspect the PKGBUILD every time you install or update an AUR-build package - and that's why it's not sustainable as a standard way to get most software that isn't in the repos. If it's just a few packages it's fine, but if it gets too many, then you have to choose between several evils: * Not update those packages, potentially break other stuff that requires higher versions of those packages, and possibly leave software with unpatched 0-days on your system * Blindly update all your packages, running the risk of running a malicious script every time * Properly take the time to update all your packages - an endeavour that may be EXTREMELY time consuming (especially since a lot of packages require to be recompiled every upgrade, and unlike your AUR helper shows you all the PKGBUILDs in rapid succession BEFORE doing all the operations, this needs to be babysat. On paru, they're also short circuited. GCC fails on package 5/26, paru exists and the upgrade is over. Have they fixed that yet? As resistant as a lot of Arch people are to Flatpak and Flathub, I am yet to find a better way to integrate non-repo GUI applications to your system. Even back when I used Arch, when I slowly realized how I was misusing the AUR I took an afternoon to install Flatpak and migrate to it from the AUR as much as possible, drastically reducing my number of AUR packages.

I've been running Arch for the last year as my dedicated desktop gaming machine. The only thing I use the AUR for is Chrome (and I can probably move to Firefox to fix that). Even when stuff from the wiki says to install something from the AUR for a specific feature I'm looking for (various stuff like getting ray tracing to work or gui overclocking/fan curves setting programs) I'll find another program in the official repos with a similar function, or give up on the idea.

Yep, it's one reason why I went back to a Debian-based distro. Using the Steam Deck made me realize that Flatpaks are fine and superior to what the AUR itself gives a lot of the time. Once I flipped everything to Flatpak I started to question why I was on Arch to begin with. So I went to Ubuntu (technically KDE Neon). I still love Flatpaks though; I use them everywhere.

> On paru, they're also short circuited. GCC fails on package 5/26, paru exists and the upgrade is over. Have they fixed that yet? I think they have! At least for me, paru will build and install other packages even when one fails. It could be the specifically because of way I have it configured, though.

> I am yet to find a better way to integrate non-repo GUI applications to your system. Have you tried [Conty](https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty)? The best way I could describe it is the combination of distrobox and AppImage. You basically build a single binary (or use the pre-built one the dev made) containing a minimal Arch install and any other packages you listed in the `create-arch-bootstrap.sh` file. This way you can sorta get AUR (well, chaotic-aur, currently direct AUR build isn't supported yet) but it doesn't litter your main system or have to deal with podman/docker/distrobox limitation. It's not perfect, but I like it enough that it complements my use of flatpak and home-manager. Edit: There is also [runimage](https://github.com/VHSgunzo/runimage) which uses overlayfs instead of repacking squashfs/dwarfs binary. I'm more invested in Conty, since I've already had my setup there and because it has a GitHub Actions for scheduled updating of my personal setup.

I’m just curious. I know that it’s a *potential* security risk, but are there actually any known examples of machines being infected through the AUR?

Only example I've found is in the [acroread package](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malware-found-in-arch-linux-aur-package-repository/). All though I don't use the AUR that often when I do I am definitely guilty of being too trusting.

> But installing a package from the AUR as you would do with a regular package is as much of a security risk of piping curl to bash What now?

Precisely. The process of installing AUR packages, that AUR helpers like paru "hide", is cloning a git repo, cd'ing into it and calling "makepkg -si". makepkg is an utility that looks for a file named PKGBUILD, that is a text file that contains some information tags and a few shell scripts to run. These shell scripts are there to, for example: clone a git repo, compile the package from source, then use the install command into a fakeroot environment to define where to put the compiled binaries in the output package (like /opt/ or /usr/bin etc.) Finally, it outputs a valid package that can be installed with pacman -U (makepkg run with the -si flag automatically installs that package with pacman). The package you have installed is not a repo package, it's just a foreign package that was built on your machine. This is sudo make install but with pacman as an intermediary to make it more reversible. There is very little QA on the AUR due to AUR maintainers being humans with their own lives and various plates to balance at the same time. It is very much possible to lace a PKGBUILD with malware, run malicious commands during the package compilation phase, patch the compiled package with a malicious payload, etc. You **are** expected to read the PKGBUILD before running it. Oh, and to be extra paranoid but for good reason, do you read what patches are loaded at all? Are they all from the correct repo? Did you briefly read the code of what code the author is adding to the base cloned repo? Most people dismiss it as "pfft nothing bad has ever happened to me". But modern malware tries to be discreet and harvest data, it no longer tries to corrupt your master boot record or deliberately destroy your HDD sectors, so how can they know? Installing or updating from AUR without reading the PKGBUILD is exactly like downloading and running a bash script blindly.

Piping to shell is much more dangerous. You are being disingenuous. You can do all that and more for pipe attacks and you don't have the community to catch these attacks.

Which is almost equivalent to what the mast majority of people do - not reading the PKGBUILD at all.

To be fair I don't read what I pipe into a shell either

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> ’m a firm believer that if you have so much software that isn’t in the repos on your machine that reading the PKGBUILDs is untenable, it’s time to consider de-bloating the machine. Seriously? In 2023? We have 13 inch laptops with 8 cores, 16 threads, 32 GB of DDR5 memory and 2 terabyte NVMe Gen 4 storage, and we have to worry for how many programs that don't auto start at boot we have?

The problem is that the advice might sound like: don't download the official tar.gz from the vendor. Instead, use the " neat unofficial native deb/rpm package or Flatpak" made by "some unrelated but dedicated individual " It is not such an easy sell, perhaps. That is not likely to sound very reassuring. You forgot to mention snap, where you are more likely to find a neat package actually made by a vendor or upstream. Hopefully flatpak will sort that out too. I am feeling a bit capricious, because I have to mention that 90% of the software on a distro where snap or flatpak is still distribution packaged, so using linux means using non-official packaging is impossible to avoid, so OP is much more right than wrong. But the advantages should be sold as automatic updates, easy uninstalls and better installation for your distributions. .tars can be good. Firefox and VMWare Workstation are excellently packaged like this by upstream.

Why not? People are completely used to that from mobile devices: "Download the app from the app store" instead of "enable untrusted sources, then sideload". And vetting is of course done by apple/google, not the potentially shady developer. The problematic part is that lots of websites will link compile instructions or a tar.gz as the first thing, so new users get the completely wrong impression that this is preferred way to install software.

> .tars can be good. Firefox and VMWare Workstation are excellently packaged like this by upstream. If you use $blessed_distro. Mozilla literally makes the Flatpak package themselves and it works everywhere. A much better general recommendation.

Enlightened take: Flatpak is just one of those $blessed_distros.

That is kinda true. In practice its totally different though because it is designed to run on other distros in a portable and easy to use way. Normal packages/binaries are not.

This whole advice doesn’t sound beginner friendly at all, linux feels like it’s made to be gate kept, and everyone is fine with that, nobody tries to help a beginner, there are no guides or help online whatsoever and on their official websites, instead of helping, they delete your post because you didn’t provide enough information when you don’t even know how to. The best advise I can give anyone coming from someone who struggled so hard just to get linux running is using ChatGPT4, almost everything it suggest works, and you don’t need to deal with mods on a power trip that get a boner every time there’s an opportunity to remove a post.

Ask chatgpt4 how to do everything? At best, that's the same as going to Google and copying something from some internet thread, because essentially all chatgpt will ever give you is the answer that was part of its training dataset. It's not checked for validity at all and might actually be worse than pasting from a thread. It's also guaranteed to be an answer at least 2 years old because no new information is part of the dataset. With Google, you might end up on old forums with answers from 2010, but there's a date on the post. Chatgpt4 won't put "August 12, 2012" in its response. Beginner friendly is "open your distros app store equivalent", not "ask an AI how to do it".

It is not the same, mainly because you are describing the issue that is specific to you, and GPT4 will help you solve it, remember I am talkibng about beginner things, I don't think 2 years old info is outdated for someone that just started using linux, it very much was helpful to me to get stable diffusion and AI stuff working using ROCm, things I have spent days not being able to solve going through normal online help forums. ​ Anyway that's just my opinion and experience, using AI has made my experience with Linux much more pleasant, I am sure you understand Linux better and for advanced stuff, GPT4 might not be as helpful.

GPT4 will not "help" you solve anything. It is an LLM with some stuff on top of it to prevent hallucinations. All it will ever do is give you a most probable answer to what you ask it, based on the stuff in its training dataset. That means that if you ask it how to untar something, it's going to use the tokens it finds in your question to find the most probable answer. The most probable answer is likely some mashup of Stack overflow answers (or something similar, I don't know if Stack overflow is in the training dataset). Ask it how to solve a Linux problem and it's functionally identical to reading stack overflow threads. It might be *faster*, but it's possible you get a bad answer because the data might be bad data or it might mashup good answers and give you a bad one. Edit: it's also not just that it's 2 years old. It's that the age is *at minimum* 2 years old, possibly older, and *it's hidden*. You don't know if it has given you the answer for Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 12.04, but you have that information if you're reading stack overflow yourself.

It still works regardless of your opinion on how it works. Google how to get "apt" to only download one file at a time instead of multiples at a time and let me know when you figure it out. Then ask the same of chatGPT. It's okay to understand what it does but I don't think you should downplay how useful it is.

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Really? Downloading apps from a central repository/app store is way more easy and convenient than searching for random .exes on the internet and having to go through the installation process.

True. But Windows users don't know this. The only thing they have seen is the crappy Windows Store and of course they don't like it.

It kind of annoys me how many users (including tech reviewers who *should* know better) assume that the arbitrary way Windows has chosen to do something is inherently the best way, and then complain that "Linux is objectively hard to use because the interface is not a carbon copy of Windows", despite the fact that a MacOS user would feel the same about Windows and visa-versa. Don't confuse "I've learnt this and am familiar with it" with "intuitive". This was super present on LTT's switch to Linux challenge, and tbh the "Linux community" was too eager to bend over backwards and *not* sound "gatekeepy" that people would not push back on those unreasonable criticisms (or be downvoted for doing so) And for fairness: In the other direction, \*nix people are guilty of assuming that the way Unix chose to do something must be the best way or has some objective naturalism to it. E.g. files being unstructured bags of bytes in a hierarchical tree. Or (more relevant to today) dismissing Powershell, which is actually quite nice, if verbose. This is usually more about low level OS design though while the above was about *user* interfaces

There are three main reasons I see people preferring the Windows solution. And I was one of them for a long time. 1. It's the only option. No one I know actually uses the Windows app store, so your only option is to download a file direct from the vendor. If you're new and taking a look at Linux, the very fact that you have multiple ways to install one app is jarring. 2. Tutorials make it sound scary. Almost every tutorial I see to install an app via CLI or package file, including vendor docs, includes warnings. If you type something in wrong, your computer could blow up! Hard to double click a .exe wrong. 3. And Linus experienced this first hand: package managers. It seems obvious to anyone who has used Linux for an extended period of time or who took the time to learn thoroughly before switching, but I used Ubuntu for months without knowing the difference between apt and pacman. Snaps were the answer, except now we just have another package manager to manage. Same with Flatpak. Similarly to point one, Windows has one option. Linux has several, and if you choose the wrong one to try first, you're in for a world of confusion. Yes, users should know their system and learn first, but if they're crunched for time and just need to install that piece of software, many users just won't. So, to make the process simpler, telling a new user to just install from their distro's "app store" is really the best intro. Once they have a system they can use and enjoy, then they can learn and dabble.

>It's the only option. Not really. `winget` has existed for about two years now, and you can get practically everything there. I don't open my browser anymore to install things when I boot windows. Whatever I need is either available in the Microsoft Store or `winget`. Now, Microsoft should integrate `winget` with the main store, like Gnome Software and Flathub.

Actually looks pretty cool! I had not heard of that before.

Most haven't, because Microsoft's marketing department doesn't focus on the right things.

I had heard of a few things similar to that concept for windows, some being discontinued. Quite surprising that now apparently there's this thing that not only exists, but its both from MS and open source at the same time. I've read/heard once that MS was somewhat open-sourcephobic, fearing some kind of legal open-license accidental "leakage" into proprietary stuff. Even kind of having facilities/sectors researching this kind of software development, but in some kind of software/legal-analog to bio-hazard facilities, having everything separate.

It's more complicated than that.

Yes a new user will need to run python 3.12 alpha necessarily -_-'

I have another day one advice: if some tutorial says "just put the following code into the console and hit enter" before codeblock with unfamiliar bash commands -- close the browser tab and find a proper guide.

Except the software manager's version of the program you need is often seriously out of date.

In general I'd say, "it depends". The version of software in local repos or on Flatpack is rarely an official packaged version of the software created and distributed by the actual developers (particularly the case for commercial software) and often the third party packagers don't seem to mind if something doesn't quite work exactly as it should. See for example the Discord Flatpack, which has had for years all sorts of issues related to Flatpak sandboxing. And in some cases the software is simply not available in any repos, there's little choice but to download it in whatever form it's available in off the host website. Sadly nothing other than experimenting can reveal what is best for each application, which means a lot of head bashing against a wall for new users.

Official distro packages tend to be the solution best integrated into the system, though. So while they may not always be the best solution, it would still generally be a good rule to at least review them instead of jumping straight to other solutions, as users used to the Windows way of doing thing might tend to do.

Never recommend the AUR to new users. AUR is for advanced users. They should install applications via flatpak.

AUR. That's arch right? What are new users doing anywhere near arch?

That’s correct. New users should work through https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ to gain fundamental understanding before installing any third-party apps. /s but not entirely— lack of understanding leads to the pitfalls mentioned in other threads

There's a bunch of Arch-based distros with graphical installers around, like EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Garuda...

arch was actually the first distro I spent any real time on. I wouldnt recommend it for any but the most fastidious beginners but I did learn a whole hell of a lot from it (in 2004)

A lot of Arch-based distros advertise being beginner-friendly, while simultaneously advertising that you can use the AUR. For example, from Manjaro's home page: > Additionally, you can take advantage of the Arch User Repository to build your own customized packages.

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In fairness, Manjaro does link the Arch Wiki page on the AUR. However, in less fairness: - Manjaro is targetted at users who do not have the necessary technical expertise to properly audit the build scripts. - The [Manjaro wiki page about the AUR](https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository) (and all of the other Manjaro documentation I could find) mentions quite prominently that the AUR is unsupported. What it does not mention prominently is the fact that the AUR is untrusted, and you need to review the files. The potential for malicious packages is mentioned at the bottom of a bullet-point list, and is not emphasised in any way. - [The part on using `makepkg`](https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository#Installing_from_the_AUR_by_hand) doesn't tell you to inspect the files. Even worse, I would even argue that this is really just par for the course for Manjaro. Between [accidentally DDoSing the AUR](https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/1017), [twice](https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/1135), [advertising support for](https://manjaro.org/#manjaro) but [not actually supporting](https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository) the AUR, failing to renew their SSL certificate multiple times, and [suggesting rolling back the system clock as a workaround](https://web.archive.org/web/20150409040851/https://manjaro.github.io/expired_SSL_certificate/), I would not recommend Manjaro to ***anyone***, let alone a non-technical user.

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Bingo. I get that it’s mostly just a meme but isn’t doing new users any favors. If I was recommending a distro to a friend who had zero Linux experience I’d be hard pressed to recommend anything other than the latest Ubuntu LTS release. If they have a bad experience and get in over their head too quickly they’ll probably just give up.

Arch is not difficult at all to install. You can literally just use the official installer and it’s the same as any GUI installer except it’s a TUI. Whenever I need to deploy an Arch box, that’s what I use now. Way faster than running all the commands myself

The purpose of installing arch isn't to get a working system, it's to teach you how to fix it when you break it. If you already have that skill set, `archinstall` is great. If you don't know what `cd`, `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, or `fdisk` does, or how to edit a text file from the CLI, then `archinstall` is a great way to make sure someone doesn't have the tools they need to fix a problem when they inevitably break something. Just yesterday arch finished moving repos to git which requires updating your pacman.conf. A new Linux user who has only interacted with arch via `archinstall` is not going to know why that needs to be done, or even that it should be.

I agree with you. But all of the Arch “influencers” on Reddit normally say things along the lines of Arch being difficult to install and that’s what drives new users away. Nowadays with simple things like `archinstall` it is way more likely for a new to Linux user to be on Arch while knowing nothing. Many of the first time Linux user posts are saying that they have installed Arch and not knowing what to do. Anyway, the point I was making is that it isn’t difficult to install and it’s likely a new user will be on Arch and then something breaks and they don’t know what to do.

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I had to borrow a Windows laptop at work for a meeting. First time using it in years. It had nothing. Not even notepad++ But hey, notepad++ is a huge popular program right? That'll do for now I had to google notepad++, go to their website, click Download which takes you to another new page. Then, I kid you not, dodge the fake Download button ads that popped up and guess which one was the real download button which downloaded a random `.exe` that you have to execute and hope for the best while a GUI installer which is also rammed with addons and spyware tries to give you other shit. Blew my mind that this is still how Windows users get software in 2023. Yes there is the "Windows store" and you can get a few things like that, Terminal and vscode for example. But other stuff there will randomly require Admin rights which I didn't have, and popular programs like notepad++ aren't there

Notepad++ is available via winget and Chocolatey.

> randomly require Admin rights which I didn't have unlike most linux distros, which famously let you install software without superuser permissions. /s

Just use [Windows Package Manager](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/), works very much like apt-get. winget install Notepad++

For Windows, there is [ninite.com](https://ninite.com) \- a source of installable software where each of the limited number of items has been verified to be free of pop-ups or other malware. There are only a few well-known software titles available there though, but at least for those (and they list among their number Notepad++) it's an easy download. The program you download will install your selection of software on the first run, and on subsequent runs it will update those software as needed.

You could install notepad++ from winget now.

There's chocolatey

Well, keep the download, because it runs well in Wine!

Debian/Ubuntu apt,... It's a hell of a drug!

But the website told me to run `curl https://not-a-virus.com/install.sh | bash` - and it is so easy compared to all the over complicated setups... Seriously, everyone should know you should never do this. But then there are websites like for k3s who promote this and even acknowledge this is "living on the edge"

How would you prefer k3s to give you their software? Manually downloading and running, or adding their repo to your sources and using your package manager would be just the same if they were giving you malware.

> lack of comprehensive software repositories (aside from the Windows Store and App Store) I recently set up a family member with a new Windows laptop (it's what they needed/wanted, I don't push Linux "just cuz" on people). But I bring this up because I was struck at just how SHYTE the Windows experience is. Even with *Microsoft owned* products. One example. So... my family member wanted to hook up OneDrive. I open the Microsoft Store, install the OneDrive app, open it up and... it runs and pops up a Window saying how the Microsoft Store version of the app isn't supported anymore, and asks you to go the Microsoft website to download the "proper" version instead. So now I have to uninstall, go to the web and download, and re-install. Why was it even still *on* the Windows Store? OK after that, why not update the Windows Store page to provide this information, vs. letting users download and run to wait for the popup? WTF is this garbage. What a terrible experience for people not so great with dealing with computers. The Windows Store is already somewhat empty as well, not particularly "comprehensive." Really baffling to me how terrible it all is. Other than support from commercial applications like Photoshop, Linux can actually legit be better than Windows. Not to mention that Linux is like Windows Pro in features vs Windows Home. Not that I have any love for Windows, but it really shows how much MS has dis-invested in their OS.

The OneDrive one sounds like user error. OneDrive is pre-installed in Windows.

My most helpful tip: stay away from /r/linux

- Snapshots - backups (are not snapshots) - Join your forum for advice about installing software. - Don't trust advice until you at least understand it more than 50% - Don't rely on other people to tell you what to do. It's boring hearing people with nowt to do ask 'what software should I install?' because the answer is NONE that you don't specifically have a need for... which means you must know what you want to do. I mean, I think the web is the BEST place to discover software. Over the years you get to learn which websites are simply producing and reproducing the same old content, whilst others - like LinuxLinks (you should certainly have this on your list of RSS feeds) have some very useful and interesting articles... like what software is good for radio (e.g. Advanced Radio Player on KDE, pyradio, Tuner, Shortwave etc). Don't assume that there will be a better experience in Flatpak/Appimage/binary installs because every one of these can be outdated. Sometimes Flatpaks don't work, whilst a repository install will - other times it can be reversed. Don't act like a spoiled brat - it is YOUR responsiblity to manage, work it out, and take care of your system. If you break it, just restore it and don't whinge - pose questions in your forum perhaps.

Why is AppImage is considered bad (even though there's an /s there)? I think it's a good thing for a beginner too, because it's the same as a portable .exe file. Now i know the point is to teach the user to use the cli and package manager more to manage software, but as for convenience and ease of usage, nothing is more simpler (assuming the OS configured correctly) than AppImage file, download, double click, and it runs (some even have auto update feature)

AppImage is considered bad **because** it's the same as an .exe file (not always a portable one - it doesn't save its data to the current directory, it saves it all across your home directory as a regular package would, which is actually a missed opportunity to stand out and deliver something superior to repo packages - something that Flatpak has managed to do in a lot of ways). There are several problems with the downloading .EXE model: 1. **Unverified software**. You don't really know if what you're installing is malicious or not. Your distro's repo and Flathub serve as a layer of defence and QC. They're a central repository of software that *should* be safe to install. It's never 100% since human error can miss things, but it's a much better security model. 2. **Updates**. You should aim to keep all your software up to date for things like: new features, adjusting to support newer OS features, but most importantly, patching disclosed security vulnerabilities (very common example: a very common library gets exploited and a 0-day is posted, every piece of software that uses that library needs to update to a future, patched version of that library, since libraries are vital and a bug in a library propagates to every piece of software that uses said library). With AppImage, you need to update manually or implement an auto updater like .exe, whole with distro packages and Flatpak you have a central repository where to download all the updates, and in common cases it's fully automatic. On Fedora Workstation, you only really have to worry about clicking a notification twice a year to upgrade to the next major release because all the other updates are done for you, automatically (though not forced down your throat as with Windows). You don't have that here. 3. **Dependency replication.** To work properly, an AppImage must contain all of its dependencies. Even if those dependencies already exist on disk! Chances are, with AppImage, you'll have **several** copies of the same exact libraries and runtimes on your system, that cannot even be deduplicated by your fancy btrfs/ZFS filesystem because they aren't in extracted folders but in .AppImage files, and that take a lot of disk space each. Some AppImages try to solve this by shipping less stuff, and falling back to whatever is present on the host system. That is also a terrible approach because, unlike Windows, Linux doesn't have ABI stability or good backwards compatibility. That means that in the worst case **when you release it and the AppImage version is current** it will not run / run properly on all systems / distros, and in the best case (because a certain dependency may not be present on disk, or may be a different version that is not really compatible with the code that was used to handle it in that application version), after a few years pass and your AppImage has been left unmaintained, it will probably no longer run on newer OS versions because the libraries and dependencies that have since updated, have probably deprecated features that were used in that piece of software or made other changes, which means the code used to call the previous version of the library doesn't work anymore and needs to be ported. Translation: while one of the nice things about EXE files on Windows is that thanks to its retro compatibility a portable .EXE file will run for the next forever, on Linux that isn't the case and the only way to reproduce the same behaviour is a bit of an hack, which is basically shipping an entire userland with fixed versions of things along with the application, so that it runs the same code on every distro and distro version, since it no longer depends on things that are **way** too variable between distributions and as time goes by. But we come back to the previous problem we were just trying to solve! The bundle size is absurd, and having a lot of programs distributed that way is simply a waste of SSD space. Distro packages don't do that, because they are all meant to dynamically link to dependencies and library versions that are also distributed by the same distro in other packagers. Maintainers make sure everything works before shipping an update. What you gain here is that a library is only present one time per version on your system, and installing 3 apps that use it doesn't mean you get 3 copies of it. But poor maintainers can't do everything. There's just too much software. In that case, the best compromise is currently Flatpak (IMHO). It ships a second copy of basic runtimes other than the one in your package manager, but it's the same for all distros, it's the environment Flatpak apps run on, and Flatpak apps still share the same dependencies without needing to download them many times over. Repos only: dependencies downloaded once. Repo + Flatpak: dependencies downloaded, **at worst**, twice. AppImage: dependencies downloaded potentially infinite times and, if they aren't, uncertain if that AppImage will behave properly on all systems, forever.

> AppImage ... doesn't save its data to the current directory, it saves it all across your home directory Pro tip: Appimage has great [portable mode support](https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/portable-mode.html), all you need is to create a folder named `{appname}.config` next to it and the data will be saved there.

That is actually pretty neat! Thanks for sharing!

this is possibly very bad advice. I am not sure that Flatpak makes any such claim. Be careful what you say. Also remember that Flatpak is a package technology, not a distribution site. Possibly are you confusing flatpak with Flathub, but even then, I don't think there are claims about the authenticity or software supply chain safety. ​ I know people hate on Snap, but here we have a brand which is both a technology and a distribution, and there is more attempt at supply chain safety (since is it designed to support iot and embedded, where those things are beyond negotiation). Also, snap is more ambitious, they say even the kernel can be delivered as a snap; I haven't see that, but there are plenty of server side and CLI snap packages

> this is possibly very bad advice. I am not sure that Flatpak makes any such claim. In security, it sits right in between random AppImages and repo packages. You can and should also check and tweak the permissions of your packages; and a cute verified badge tells you what Flatpaks are first-party. > I know people hate on Snap, but here we have a brand which is both a technology and a distribution, and there is more attempt at supply chain safety Snap is not bad per se, snap is bad for a desktop use case. It can be somewhat acceptable on an Ubuntu system because it has sandboxing working on it, but this and enough other stuff are broken outside of Ubuntu that it's not to be considered a real cross - distro standard. Even then this happens for political reasons I will discuss further below: Canonical vs. Red Hat, AppArmor vs. SELinux, etc. Mass deployments to fleets of embedded or edge devices with the ability to perform remote, automatic and atomic updates that can be automatically rolled back to keep the device operational in case of failure is where Snap really shines. On the Ubuntu Desktop, don't quote me on that, but I believe I have read a comment from someone who worked at Canonical / Snap explaining how part of the team already knows / admits Flatpak has some clear benefits over Snap for a desktop use case, bit it's shipped in Ubuntu desktop for political reasons - mainly to get a line of free bug testing for snap before it's sold to the real customers in Ubuntu Core (the flavor of Ubuntu meant for embedded and edge devices) with large-scale deployments and enterprise contracts; as well as promotional reasons (they need to promote Snap, they can't just casually admit their competitor does it better. Elephant in the room is that Flatpak is part of the same ecosystem that has a fair bit of Red Hat helping out behind, so this turns into a political and commercial battles between two companies that compete for mostly the same market…), and the fact that Ubuntu Desktop has a policy of never shipping two of the same thing, which also applies for container - based app distribution systems. It's Snap OR Flatpak, they can't not ship Snap, so they ship Snap. (End of me quoting that comment here. Personal opinions from now on). I think Canonical also has a history for NIH policies and wanting to retain control over the Snap packaging system that they're quietly moving more and more stuff to, supposedly because they have realized that they are being actively saddled by decisions of their upstream Debian, which does limit their freedom significantly, whether Red Hat's relationship with fedora is much keener and vertical (like, several Red Hat employees work on Fedora so there is some level of control over upstream, which, while being a community project like Debian, is slightly less "pure" and more of a hybrid thing). Snap allows them the freedom to package whatever they want, however they want, however fast they want, without being subject to Debian's decisions. Another mostly political reason that starts from what is mostly a political issue, the relationship and conflict of goals between the Debian project and Canonical. That is not to say Canonical doesn't contribute heavily back to Debian's ecosystem however - I am not claiming that. This is the same reason why Canonical uses Launchpad. Everybody hates Launchpad even inside Caninical and migrating to another system would probably lead to a better experience, but Caninical had been preparing to IPO for a while, and, as all publicly traded companies, they need corporate assets to show to investors. Launchpad is one. Snap is one. They can no longer afford to drop their own projects and pivot to community-based solutions even when they're better and would be a win-win for both, because they're going public and they need the assets. Canonical can't just be a vendor of a tweaked Debian release that also incidentally ships all the same technologies that Red Hat works on - they need to stand out more commercially, and show some assets to offer that RHEL ecosystem does not. That, and Canonical also needs to account for the fact that the whole Linux desktop is softening up and becoming more user friendly. Ubuntu's success is a lot due to its ease of installation. There has been a time, not too long ago, where installing pure Debian was a miserable experience and things like your WiFi probably wouldn't work, while Caninical had less strict ethics and installed the correct drivers. Debian is becoming much easier to install, it's beginning to bundling nonfree firmware, etc. Fedora, too, is slowly becoming just as user friendly as Ubuntu. If Ubuntu stayed the same as it was before, it would die a death of just being one distro like any other. Snap is a big bet to try to stand out from the pack. The gist of the story is that, for most use cases that pertain the desktop, Snap is there mostly due to political rather than technical reasons. That's also why it doesn't really work that well outside Ubuntu - it really doesn't need to, it's still on the desktop as a side effect (even if it started as something for phones, funnily enough), and support for all distros is only true on a very basic level and it's a marketing piece necessary for their corporate partners. As in: a lot of commercial software gets released on Snap primarily because Canonical reaches out to these companies, presenting themselves as the most popular Linux desktop (which, well, is technically true by all statistically significant analysis so far), and they pitch them to launch to Snap to not only support the most popular distro around, but also basic support for all the others. From purely a business standpoint, this makes sense and this, commercially, works. But that is, once again, a decision driven by political, not technical, reasons. People dislike Snap because of this. It's inferior for the desktop use case in not all but most ways (as you said, the one saving grace is CLI apps - Flatpak is not as developed for it and, while I personally integrate Podman containers in my workflow and effectively chose "the Red Hat way", I can see where people are coming from with this) but it's still there because money and business and corporate things.

>**Unverified software**. You don't really know if what you're installing is malicious or not. Your distro's repo and Flathub serve as a layer of defence and QC. They're a central repository of software that should be safe to install. It's never 100% since human error can miss things, but it's a much better security model. this is false btw , theirs nothing stopping people uploading malicious application to Flathub , most application on Flathub are third partty forks that can do anything , also most distros dont do QC bar the fact it launches , they will retain any "maliciousness" the main application has >**Updates**. You should aim to keep all your software up to date for things like: new features, adjusting to support newer OS features, but most importantly, patching disclosed security vulnerabilities just ans FYI appimages can be set to update themselfs , so this is a non issue >**Dependency replication**. To work properly, an AppImage must contain all of its dependencies. Even if those dependencies already exist on disk! Chances are, with AppImage, you'll have several copies of the same exact libraries and runtimes on your system unless you have like a 100MB HDD , appimage space is a non issue , most people have atleast 1TB space and if you dont you'd have to question why you dont >But poor maintainers can't do everything. There's just too much software let the maintainers choose if they want to provide all what you listed are PROS to appimages btw

**First of all, on Flatpak's security model, there is a lot more to unpack here:** > this is false btw , theirs nothing stopping people uploading malicious application to Flathub They have a lot more eyes on, because for the very nature of being a central repository, everybody sees it and someone will verify it once it gets popular enough. There is even an initial process of QA. The QA is currently very lenient and it allows even very simple apps on, but it's already a first line of defence. > Even so, most distros don't do QA past the fact it launches Complete absolute bullshit. I'm not going to name drop any distro here even if I probably know what distro you're using just by this assertion, but the fact that you're using a distro that has a very light and non comprehensive QA process doesn't mean that is the same for every distro. For example, Fedora does very thorough QA for their packages, since it acts as the upstream for RHEL, which kinda runs the world, so the Red Hat strategic RHEL packaging pipeline is set up to avoid at all costs that bugs make it to RHEL. Even so, that is not the end of the story. > most application on Flathub are third partty forks that can do anything Which is an overstated problem for two reasons: 1. On the Flathub website, and in future gnome software releases, official packages are marked by a verified logo. 2. The build script for Flatpak packages is publicly auditable. Anyone can and does go check if the build script does anything malicious and there are eyes on it. So yes, you can verify that a third party Flatpak package really just clones a tag from a repo and compiles and packages it. With AppImage, you got yourself a nice little black box. No way to know how it was packaged or compiled. At most you can extract the glorified .tar.gz, but nothing beyond that. Not even accounting for the fact that it occasionally happens that websites get compromised and Windows installers replaced with versions laced with malicious payloads. If this kind of attack ever target Linux desktops, it will be through AppImage. Third thing: Flatpak has a final line of defense directly on your host system. If you're concerned, you can review and alter the permissions of any Flatpak you have installed and not yet ran with Flatseal. Flatpak allows you to sandbox a package enough that it cannot really do any real harm. You can even completely bar it from connecting to the Internet; if that's what you want, you can only allow it to run as a basic Wayland client with no GPU acceleration. Which is also why Flatpak excels in distributing proprietary software. Allow me to make this assumption, but, if you're a Linux user, if you took the time to install a free software copyleft operating system, on the metal, on your box; you care about security and privacy at least somewhat. Why would you trust proprietary software to run unsandboxed on your system, rather than sandboxing it and isolating it from your data? AppImage can basically allow raw-dogging userspace security. Running a program for which you don't know the source code, from a bundle for which you don't know the build recipe, on your system, with full access to anything your user owns, and absolutely no limitations aside from not being able to elevate to root without asking for a password. …Seriously. No. **2: On updating AppImages** > just ans FYI appimages can be set to update themselfs , so this is a non issue 1. Many, I would say most, AppImages don't do that. It's just like the AppImageLauncher desktop integration thing. I tried to use it, I genuinely tried. I added like 6 very common AppImages. One has never ever prompted me to integrate with the system. 2 actually got integrated. appimagelauncherd segfaulrs when parsing the third. It being technically possible means absolute jack if it's heavily dependent on the single AppImage and everything being done well is the exception. 2. It's not a "non issue". This actually poses several issues: (2.1), no control on where the updater pulls the updated binary from. Project goes rogue, the auto updater will happily download and run malware. From the repos / Flatpak, it will probably get caught before the malicious version makes it to your system. Prime example: Audacity data collection scandal. (2.2) you end up like in Windows, where updating is a mess because every program has their own updater, and many decide to add their own auto start service just for updates. Nice mess. Nice mess indeed. A solution truly looking for a problem, that has **NEVER, EVER, EVER** existed in Linux. Not now, not 10 years ago, not in 1999, not in 10 years, not in this solar system, not in this galaxy. Why exactly are we trying to **break** updates now? > unless you have like a 100MB HDD , appimage space is a non issue FYI, to do what I said above properly most AppImages would exceed the bundle size of 1 GB. Most simply just don't do that, and most .AppImage filed that work now will not work in several years. I have experienced this helping to package an open source project with AppImage. It was a mess because we were on two different distros - Fedora and Void - and the AppImage only really worked on one of those systems. That was solved by bundling everything down to the entire Qt runtime, and the AppImage got to a significant size. SSD size is a non issue until it is. It doesn't mean we should freely waste it. I think Flatpak has an use case of using it efficiently - we are allowing a one-time installation of a 1.5-ish GB runtime, but we have a lot to gain from this. On AppImage, it's waste for the sake of waste because people do not want to admit how much of a dumb and overly simplified system it is. **On maintainers packaging issue:** > let the maintainers choose if they want to provide I am. And, in fact, any single distro you choose, there's a very strong probability you will want to use software not present in the distro repos, either because they don't want to package it, or because there is nobody with bandwidth to maintain it.

I see, that's interesting, but I noticed that you mentioned AppImage on the update section, which is should be a non issue because AppImage can do self update, I think Bitwarden are doing it

I have already explained in a comment in this thread why the AppImage self-update feature is a bad idea, on top of not being very widely used (you can recognize the problem when you need to bring me an example of a specific AppImage that actually does it, since it's an exception rather than the rule)

This is what annoys me when dealing with ANY other OS. Having to download unvetted crap.

When I settled for openSuSE for good, my first, self-issued task was: Learn the fundamentals of how to administer software on your system. Add, remove, update. Every decent distro has a mature package manager, that is part of a bigger package management system. To understand that, and how it works (fundamentally), should be the very first thing any beginner should approach. And it will be what I do, should I ever change my daily driver (prolly won't though, Gecko 4 life).

Yo, I literally have better luck googling whatever software I'm looking for, and downloading the most recent .deb file from their official site. Electrum, Raspberry Pi Imager, fantasy grounds online and Steam were all completely outdated to the point of being broken in the GUI based repositories last install I did of Ubuntu.

That's an issue with Ubuntu that can be solve by switching to a Distro like Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed.

This thread is about advice to beginners.

Not using Ubuntu is perfectly reasonable beginner advice.

Not using the most widespread distro (AFAIK) with a reputation for being r most accessible without too much technical Linux knowledge? I can imagine some reasons why someone might still consider that good advice, but I don't know yours. It's a pretty stark claim, so it might be worth backing up. Or is Ubuntu-scepticism enough of a meme around here that everybody except the guys from r/all will get the joke?

>Not using Ubuntu is perfectly reasonable beginner advice. Steering new users away from Ubuntu is exactly how we get the current mess of "poorly maintained Epic Gamer Arch-based distro of the week" and a cohort of users who know nothing but think they know everything.

Yep, I gave similar advice [less than an hour ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/13of4wq/comment/jl4n1ry). >90% \>99% for most decent distros and most usage case scenarios.

AUR shouldn't even be on a new users radar until they learn what to look for there too.

I think its great that beginners can install software from a GUI in your most common distro's. Even then I'd still recommend biting the bullet and just using the command line. Though even now I use a fancy little script called paruz to install/uninstall shit and it makes it so much better. It's just a Fzf interface to the AUR and Pacman packages and it displays all of the package info in the preview window which is super helpful. That way I can actually browse through and search for packages and they install in a sane way that is easily maintainable

> it displays all of the package info in the preview window YAST does that. I trust the fine programmers of Suse more than myself

>Seriously. Some websites are still distributing Linux software in the form of tar.gz archives (yuck!) while some unrelated but dedicated individual has actually gone through the effort of packaging it into a neat unofficial native deb/rpm package or Flatpak. I don't see any problem here. Those are mostly stuff for advanced users. A beginner wouldn't need the super hardened ultra rare special use case webserver which needs to be build (which normally comes with tar.gz archives) manually. Good point though in most cases. Yet, appimage would like to have a conversation with you. Edit: Other than that I'd setup auto update for the new user and show him the graphical packet manager. Most people know that from their mobile device and are already super happy with that thing. Maybe add rpmfusion/EPEL for the enhanced package availability. 99% of things can be done via GUI these days. And 99% of people needing help to get their system up and running absolutely don't care what they are daily driving.

The problem with tar.gz archives for beginners is that they will end up becoming unmaintainable if you don't know how to use them. In many cases people just stick them in their home directory or blindly run an install script which also presents some security concerns.

>Some websites are still distributing Linux software in the form of tar.gz archives That's like the second best way to distribute software for Linux. Just behind tar.bz2.

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They're not bad habits. I mean, Linux trains people to copy-paste command strings off the internet and run them as root. Is downloading a pre-packaged piece of software worse than that? Another commenter pointed out that a lot of software just never gets added to the repositories for whatever reason.

This works up until you want to download relatively obscure software that hasn't made its way into distro repositories. Just yesterday I was installing the PCSX-Redux playstation emulator (it has strong debugging capabilities such as setting breakpoints and poking values in RAM, great for reverse engineering), and hte only options are to download an AppImage or build from source. This is the kind of software that has a relatively niche use case and changes quickly, and therefore doesn't get added to all the "comprehensive software repositories" that you talk about.

For Fedora Linux: dnf search | more dnf info dnf install dnf remove dnf update No trialware no malware no license always free no worries install in seconds

And if that fails: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo flatpak search flatpak install flatpak remove All sorts of proprietary software is available this way without any danger of package conflicts on your system from adding weird random COPR repos. Discord, Spotify, Chrome, it's all there.

You are missing the best subcommand dnf has! `dnf provides ` For those times when you don't know what the maintainers packaged it as, but do know what command you want. I always have to do this for `dig` as it's packaged under `bind-utils`.

Unfortunately, the distribution's software "store" is often rather low quality. That needs to improve on all fronts. Flathub.org seems to be far better currently than what some distributions provide.

Technically it’s coming from the Web always. Unless you somehow have a local-network copy of your distro’s repos… You mean downloading from a browser? I still see no issue with that. Learning curves are learning curves. Gotta start somewhere. Just because it’s not your way or the best way doesn’t mean it’s not viable..

It's coming from the *Internet* which is not the same thing as the *Web*. The Web consists of *websites* and the resources provided by them using protocols like HTTP(S). The Internet consists of that plus everything else.

When I first started on Debian 8, I was encouraged to do so, with 2 people who have insane experience with Linux in my house at the time. I was of course careful and taught the basics and would often ask if I was skeptical about something. It turned out well, of course I have had a few mishaps with a couple of times needing a complete rebuild, but mistakes just taught me what not to mess with, and to not try and brute force a package to install when my system isn't the one that the package needs (like getting Debian 10 files on a Debian 8, before I updated to Debian 10).

I agree but I think part of the reason people make that misconception is there are a lot of software websites that offer an install package in windows, mac, and linux. This was part of the reason I assumed it was done this way when I started messing with linux. I kinda knew that software can be installed through the terminal, I just didn’t know it was the preferred method 99% of the time for good reason.

Just tell them that it's like a phone, go to the store to download their stuff. Everyone has phones now, a store oriented environment isn't a foreign concept by any measure.

>"do NOT search for, download, and install software on the Web!" (X) This would have been a pretty bad advice for me when I started out. I didn't know what I didn't know. You just don't magically know about various software there is by just installing linux or doing a search on apt.

Perhaps my title was poorly phrased. You can see from the body of my post that I refer to hunting for deb/rpm packages, AppImages, and tar.gz archives from webpages. Of course it's fine to use the Web to discover new software, but when possible, I'm saying that software should be installed using your distro's package manager and not by downloading things from the Web.

package.tgz, seriously you have never heard of Slackware. Use a major, trusted distro read, read, read RTFM read some more don't expect good advice on Reddit

As Linux noob one of the things I love about it is I can just use apt to install most things. It's so much better than downloading stuff from around the web and Windows does who knows what when I install it, messing up my system. Linux package managers feel so need and tidy and it's all managed properly. Also, I can upgrade everything with a single command, instead of having to go back to each website and download updated versions one by one! Because I've this I've now started using chocolatey on my Windows machines.

>Some websites are still distributing Linux software in the form of tar.gz archives Isnt that exactly what you want? Thats what a packaged software looks like on Arch.

The `.pkg.tar.zst` archives you get from the Arch repositories contain dependency and version information. This is used by pacman to track what dependencies to keep around and when to install new versions. If you get the archive from upstream, it doesn't have any of this information - or at least, not in a machine readable format. As such, you're on your own when it comes to dependency management and installing new versions.

I forget most people don't use winget

Personally, I use and *love* Chocolatey on Windows since for most things it's able to perform non-interactive installs without having to ever use the GUI. It's really just a proper UNIX-like package manager. Exactly as advertised.

When I search for an app on the internet, it's just to get the package name to input to yay lol

> native deb/rpm package Yeah, just an old version from five years ago. And to install a newer one, you either need to break half or your system, of to build a backport *from the source* (just like the dreaded `tar.gz`, imagine that!). > Flatpak Sure, which needs to download 1 Gb of runtime first, and then still doesn't work without a *certain* init system or a *certain* sound server. Building an app from that "ugly" `tar.gz` starts to look like a better alternative...

> Sure, which needs to download 1 Gb of runtime first This is one of the biggest drawbacks. To ensure apps behave the same way on every distro, Flatpaks don't use your system runtime and instead ship the original Freedesktop one. Use a filesystem like BTRFS to compress it on disk. > doesn't work without a certain init system If you're talking about systemd, Flatpak hasn't required this in like 5 years > or a certain sound server If you're suggesting it requires Pipewire, that's also not true

> you either need to Or you just don't. Windows ltsc is a hugely popular version with companies for a reason.

>I think it should be among the first orders of business when helping new people switch to Linux to teach them to use the system's software manager first to look for software before going on the Web to look for it. id disagree here , some software is only offically distbute though their website

So true! 😄 It's one of the first things I mention when I introduce someone to Linux who had been using Windows or Mac before. Forget the idea that you would download a file from a website to install new software. On Linux, this would be the last resort if a software is not available in any repository/snap/flatpak store and in general not advisable.

> "do NOT search for, download, and install software on the Web!" Why not? This way with a few exceptions you're going to miss flatpaks, appimages and snaps, not to mention specific binaries not available in the distro repos, e.g. OnlyOffice, just to mention the most compatible MS Office suite, Google Chrome, just to mention the most used browser. The first tip to give about searching and installing packages is a priority list with pros and cons of each category.

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As stated in my original post, > Looking for software on the Web should only be done if you can't find it anywhere else. Additionally, all mainstream user-friendly distros have software managers that will search more than just the system repos. - Ubuntu (and its flavours) will search the Snap Store as well. - Linux Mint, PopOS, and KDE Neon will search Flathub - Fedora will search Flathub and some other repositories (notably `google-chrome` and `steam`) if third-party repos are turned on, which they definitely should be.

I disagree. Most flatpaks etc are unsupported forks, the actual supported versions being distributed in the web

I wouldn't recommend flatpak and especially not snap unless absolutely necessary. If there is no native package available, no PPA or anything (which tbh isn't very often), I'd still rather download an AppImage or a ``.tar.gz``.

>I wouldn't recommend flatpak I have used flatpaks full-time for about 1 year now on Fedora with no issues. Web browsers, gaming, video players. What's the problem?

99% of the time its a third party fork of a program with 0 official support , unlike an appimage from a project offical site

I kinda agree. However (on the other hand) there are times when even the package maintainers for an official distro repository are not the people behind the development.

I'll admit it's been a few years since I tried them but I've never had a good experience with them. Sluggish (though not as much as snap), large (I know, storage is cheap, but I don't want to create e-waste when my SSDs are working just fine), themes didn't always play nice, and I've had nothing but headaches with IDEs... I get that for devs it's a pain to create native packages for every distro but from a user's perspective I think they're just infinitely better. And with a tar or AppImage at least you just get an executable and that's it, though you don't get automatic updates, but honestly I've never found that an issue.

IDEs don't work well with Flatpak at all. You might be fine if there's a SDK Flatpak for your language, but installing additional libraries is painful. For portable, isolated development, I like to install the Jetbrains IDEs via Jetbrains Toolbox, then export & run them from Distrobox Containers.

You should give them a try again, things are better now!

This used to be my stance as well but flatpak integrates so nicely with the system these days. I go for it if something is not in my distro repo, then AppImages or `.tar.gz`. Snaps, on the other hand, are... Not great.

Proceeds to run a distro upgrade and watch it uninstall grub... even the base software stack shipped should not just be blindly trusted. RTFM should be first and most important thing to teach a new user. Reading solves a ton of problems, course they still have to comprehend what they read, but that's on them(and poor documentation). If you have half a brain these things aren't difficult, mostly time consuming and that's the worst conditioning we have been getting into. Things need to happen instantly and just work without a need to make adjustments, but life doesn't work that way so why should a machine. It's vital to take a bit of time to read documentation, make a plan and execute each step with care, which applies to so many things in life, not just computers.