this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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I tried to use Ubuntu for a bit but I just wanted to have regular Firefox with the built in updater, turns out this is way more of a hassle than it is on Windows.
It shouldn't be that hard to "install" a program like Firefox directly from a website but all you get is an archive thing that you have to manually "install" basically, it's tricky enough that someone wrote a tool just do do this: https://gitlab.com/Linux-Is-Best/Firefox-automatic-install-for-Linux
APT and Flatpacks are all cool but an offline installation should still be available and easy to use without being forced to use a terminal. Maybe I'm incorrect and I would love to hear about it but this is my experience.
Steam for whatever reason is basically installed the same way on windows as on PC in terms of user experience, you download a file and double click it. Maybe it's Mozillas fault? Who knows, it's frustrating in any case.
Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) have a slightly different way of installing programs and applications. It has an app store, similar to Android and iOS, you can search for Firefox (and other apps) from in there. If I'm not mistaken, Ubuntu searched and notifies you for updates regularly.
The philosophy of Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) is that you don't need to go to a bunch of different sites to download your software, you can just download all your software from the "app store".
And all of these tools are GUI's (so 'point and click'-based), so you don't need to open a terminal, if you don't want to.
Everything you said is true but it's beside the point, all this app store stuff shouldn't affect how easy or hard it is to install something the old fashioned way.
I know Firefox is there but I would to have the option to install it and programs like it without some kind of app store.
You mentioned android and it's a perfect example of what I want, you have a nice app store but you can if you want download any app or anything from a website and it's just one file that's easy to install and it won't update along with everything else or they can often check for updates on their own.
to me this is a feature rather than an issue, whenever a package is updated in the package repository it's super convenient to just update them from the same place instead of having auto-updaters built into all applications on the system. i guess that's a preference thing though.
So your problem is that the updater is not contained within the app itself, but in the packet manager of the OS?
Yes but my main issue is that installing software can be a pain in general. The script that someone made just to download and install firefox from mozilla.org is evident of that:
Isn't it kind of odd that this has to have a script in the first place? Or is it actually easy and this script is redundant? From a windows perspective the fact that you can't just download an installer that works it's pretty weird. I notice that other software often offers
.debor.rpmfiles and maybe those are more what I want..But also repositories can be a pain, I remember trying to install the emulation thing RetroArch via the app store thing on ubuntu and that was outdated and installing cores was very different from how I did it on PC.
https://retroarch.com/index.php?page=linux-instructions