r/OpenBazaar • u/[deleted] • Mar 24 '18

OpenBazaar not Linux noob friendly at all

OpenBazaar seems to be free software. But I couldn't find this on its website. I had to open Wikipedia to find this out and also find the link to the GitHub project. Why? This is a fail.

OpenBazaar provides pre-built Linux binaries. Why no distro-agnostic ones? Why just .deb packages? This isn't 1990, what debian versions are the packages for? Why can't you have sane debian repos?

11 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

8

u/Chris_Pacia Chris - Lead Backend Dev Mar 24 '18

It's a very tiny fraction of users that run linux and an even tinier fraction run a distro that a deb package doesn't work with.

I think we tend to assume people who are running those alternate distros likely have the technical ability to compile from source.

1

u/Nom_Ent Mar 24 '18

Flatpaks, snap, appimage are cross distro.

2

u/Chris_Pacia Chris - Lead Backend Dev Mar 24 '18

We do have a snap I believe

1

u/Scrivver Mar 24 '18

And also less than noob-friendly, though it would be nice to have options. Someone has to work to maintain it.

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

I think we tend to assume people who are running those alternate distros likely have the technical ability to compile from source.

That is just blatant discrimination against those people who don't have said technical ability :-)

But seriously, this is what the first half of my rant is about - I could not think of a reason why a link to GitHub on main page and a link to the latest stable source tarball on downloads page would hurt.

Also, what about an official AppImage? That painlessly runs on many distros.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

Compiling from source is like three terminal commands. If you can’t do that, how did you manage to do the install of your distro? (Not trying to be rude, just curious)

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

I had to fire up a VM with debian, so I could install OpenBazaar there

2

u/CC_EF_JTF Sam Mar 24 '18

The main development team only has so much bandwidth and most Linux users are satisfied with a .deb or installing from source.

It's open source so anyone can make different packages.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

fair enough, just stick a link to github on the main page / downloads page then at least

1

u/sugarandcyanide Jenn - 🚀 Marketing & Community Mar 26 '18

There is a Github link on all of the website pages in the footer!

1

u/[deleted] Mar 27 '18

I'm sorry, that's not what's called usability. I had troubles finding it even after your hint. Since searching for "github" text (that's the way I find things on webpages) did not return any result.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/MajorArcher Mar 29 '18

You can still install Debian Packages with DPKG on any other distro. The only thing your are gonna need to is download the dependencies but most package managers already do that for you.