Speaking from personal experience, most programs made until early to mid-2010s either just werk (assuming required DLLs are installed), or require a small amount of fuckery in settings. Office 2010, Adobe Audition CS6, ABBYY FineReader 12, this kinda stuff.
If only they respected my DE's theme.
xfwm4 --replace
Never packaged before but I'm down for growing a beard. What's a good resource/book to get a good grasp, for things that might trip you up, on that aside from the deb docs/arch wiki?
Forget arch, there's no better resource than getting a successful install of LFS (Linux from scratch) or KISS linux.
Debian has just about everything on the planet already packaged so it's a great resource to look at the ways it can be done(within the 'deb/dpkg' environment) and you can practice with just repackaging a new version of things before moving on.
It encourages bad practices and the overall downward spiral of the system you're currently using. Did the massive improvements in hardware, after some point in time, make your life easier as an end user? Sure, the initial bump was great but it's just fucking miserable existing on this plateau of dogshit software gunting up my fast silicon. Same bump is felt today with unreasonable programs like Steam and web browsers, things that perhaps make sense to ship as a Flatpak or Appimage. The problem is, there is no Linus in the binary shipping distro world that can tell stupid faggots to stop containerizing trivial programs, meaning it's absolutely going to happen - because everything is supposed to be fun and inclusive, as opposed to working as expected.
You're talking about CP/M, right?
k y s
I mean, recalculating large spreadsheets would be one example. Of course, Excel doesn't give you the ability to do that if you need custom functions, unless you rewrite everything in a thread-safe XLL library. An elegant solution for complex financial problems!
I mean, if you actually need to install anything from source, and it isn't a poorly coded web browser or some fucking node thing, you can always just run the Debian 'checkinstall' script that's been around for decades which just runs 'make install' and figures out what that did to your system. Packaging is only complex if you care about cleaning up config files and gay shit like that.
It drives me crazy that my current rig feels no faster than my old one when doing general stuff. Sure gaming is better, but everything else feels just as slow and even unstable.
Even then I feel it's had more of an impact on Windows. With Linux, even HDDs feel fairly snappy (at least I never had much of an issue even with spinners) but windows is an absolute disaster. I have an old laptop which was pretty beefy for the time when it came out but was borderline unusable because of how slow Win 10 was. Then I installed an NVME to use as a boot drive and the difference was insane. Windows became somewhat useable.
It's fucking Electron. Everyone's using it now and there's no real problem when it's just one program but now you have five programs using Electron open at once and whoops there goes most of your RAM.
Windows fetching and paging is so fucky that it ends up backfiring and not only results in a sore user experience but also hurts the life of the disks. This has been a problem as far back as Windows 7 at least.
It is both a strength and a weakness of Linux to have a huge array of package managers but it is too bad so many of them suck. Ironically one of the better ones for what it does is Homebrew for MacOS. They even ported it to Linux itself which strikes me as mildly insane.
Are you trying to imply that instead of every app on a system sharing a bunch of libraries that every one using its own library has some memory impact?
Considering one of the the first complaints from Linux users is "who is this cache/buffers guy and why is he using all my RAM". Yes. Linux(and Unix in general) is very aggressive about keeping useful stuff in RAM, even to the point that it will swap stuff out that's not used. "Why is my system using swap, why doesn't it just use the cache".
Yeah but I wouldn't call that fancy. Windows tries to be fancy about it which results in constant swapping that bogs things down and I'm amazed they still default to superfetching being enabled.
This shit started with Vista. Does anyone remember those hybrid HDDs (with SSD cache) Microsoft aggressively pushed with Vista's release?
None of this would be necessary if Amiga Workbench had gained just a little more traction. A full 32 bit, pre-emptive multitasking OS, available for home computing at an affordable price, when its competitors were expensive (in the tens of thousands range) cooperative-tasking 16- and 8-bit OSen. And it had Cannon Fodder. Tragic, really.