Paid apps can also steal user data and also I’d be way way more concerned about ‘free’ mobile apps than open source programs.

Mobile apps can and will get a jarring amount of your data just for being installed.

I literally just moved to Gnome 44 from a long time Gnome 3 setup. I only found one extension that makes Gnome 4x feel usable the way gnome 3 was and that’s v-shell. If v-shell breaks then I’m never moving to gnome 45.

They should make a new version of Linux From Scratch where all you get is the Linux kernel source code and you write the compiler and core utils yourself. Now that would be Linux.

Unless she uses Peacock. They seem to be the only streamer that’s clinging to the 15 year old idea of just not supporting Linux.

That’s fair and Microsoft fired their entire update testing team and then pushed multiple updates that bricked Windows installs. And that was just Windows 10.

Huh. Are you running any kind of exotic setup? What kind of bugs were they? Can you be sure they were Debian bugs and not hardware issues?

Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.

Sounds like you need an LTS.

I’ve used a lot of Ubuntu over the years starting on 9.04. Let me tell you the six months releases are ass and always have been.

Also I’m switching to Debian.

I hope someone who has more info comes along. It might be time for you to make a new post though since we’re getting to the heart of the problem now.

Also it will be a lot easier for people to diagnose if you are specific about which programs you are failing to install.

I’ve only experimented with Python in docker and it gave me a lot of headaches.

That’s why I prefer to pip install things inside venvs because I can just tar them myself and have decent portability.

But since your installing files across the system I’m not sure what the best solution is.

Thanks for the info! I’m definitely gonna look into flatpak.

I built nodejs from source yesterday and it took forever. I’d definitely prefer something huge like that in a flatpak.

This method should work with any command that’s installing files on your disk but it’s probably not worth the headache when virtual environments exist for python.

Any POSIX compliant system as far as I know.

I did Linux From Scratch recently and they have a brilliant solution. Here’s the full text but it’s a long read so I’ll briefly explain it. https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/more_control_and_pkg_man.txt

Basically you make a new user with the name of the package you want to install. Login to that user then compile and install the package.

Now when you search for files owned by the user with the same name as the package you will find every file that package installed.

You can document that somewhere or just use the find command when you are ready to remove all files related to the package.

I didn’t actually do this for my own LFS build so I have no further experience on the matter. I think it will eventually lead to dependency hell when two packages want to install the same file.

I guess flatpaks are better about keeping libraries separate but I’m not sure if they leave random files all over your hard drive the way apt remove/apt purge does. (Getting really annoyed about all the crud left in my home dir)