I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn’t figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I’m trying to get gpaint to work. My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it’s the last good version of GTK+), so I have to set that up manually as well. [[[ EDIT: gtk2 is alive and well. I was just being and idiot and searching for gtk2, when the package is actually called gtk+2. ]]] I installed all of the dependencies that ./configure told me to, but I still kept getting obscure errors when running make.

So, here’s my question: what tools make the process of running abandonware easier? Docker containers? Also, what can I use to package abandonware in order to make it easy for other people to run? Flatpak? Appimages? Any advice is appreciated!

Also, inb4 “just find a modern alternative”. That would be a reasonable solution. I don’t want reasonable solutions!

  • paholg@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Why isn’t there a way for Linux users to automatically install every missing dependency for a program?

    There is; actually there are several. Every^* distribution has a package manager, that’s what it does. But you have to make a package for the program, similar to what the tegaki folks have done for Mac and Windows.

    Another option is to statically link everything.

    One issue is the fragmentation; because there are so many Linux distributions, it’s hard to support packages for all of them. This is one thing that flatpack aims to solve.

    I would expect this to be an issue for old closed-source software, but not for old free software. Usually there’s someone to maintain packages for it.

    Some cursory searching shows no tegaki package on flathub or in nix (either of these can be used on any distro; the nix one is surprising to me; it hosts soooo many packages).

    But I do see it in Debian: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=tegaki