wove wrote: ↑Tue Jun 21, 2022 4:39 pm
I have been playing with homebrew on the Mac. Homebrew is also available for Linux, and the Linux sub-system for Windows. In operation it is not too different from Arch's AUR. I think technically it brings the BSD ports tree to whatever system it is installed on. Source code is downloaded, using native compilers it creates applications that are running in containers not so different from flatpack.
I was reading comments from a fellow talking about creating and running a Linux DE on the Windows sub-system for Linux. I wondered if this might be a method that could be used to create an up to date Plasma DE on Debian. Start with a base install of Debian, install homebrew and then use tools in homebrew to compile and run the latest Plasma.
In the end this would not be different from using ports to install Plasma on BSD, however since Linux generally has broader and newer hardware support one would have access to newer wifi and other hardware that has not yet made it to BSD.
I may just fire up a VM to test that...
Edit - I've got brew set up, just need to learn how to use it. And then start figuring out how many billions of packages I need to compile in order to try to make plasma work.
I will be interested in hearing your experiences. One of the things I like about working with ports, is that everything happens in user land. In BSD, early MacOS and early Linux, DEs and applications were user specific. They seemed to quickly move to all users sharing environments, and applications. But it was nice when computers were typically shared for everyone to have their own unique space. I would not need to look at the kid's applications, or my wife's applications and they would not need to deal with mine.
It think using homebrew it should be possible to create a user with gnome another with plasma one with xfce and so on. That way you could keep up with any new developments in the different desktop environments without the issue of one messing up the other. I don't know, something to try. I really should move my solid standby Silverblue to an older laptop and take back the faster/newer IdeaCentre for more fun explorations.
Played with Neon quite a bit last night and liked it. Its gotten much more stable, love the changes in kinfocenter and overall its a good experience for everyday use. Updating has really cleaned up but the system upgrade packages that make you restart before the install is really silly to me.
I've never seen it request a reboot before doing updates before myself. I like Neon to an extent. I would absolutely adore it if they'd just rebase on Debian instead of Ubuntu. But yeah, I do still keep that one laptop running it because it is nice to have a debian-esque system running the latest and greatest KDE without the headaches of now having to have stuff from Experimental, other stuff from SID just to keep the desktop up to date.
Will take a look. In regards to Neon their updating method has been that way for quite sometime. Whenever a system upgrade package is offered, its downloaded amd then it asks to restart and updates before rebooting.
But yeah, I do still keep that one laptop running it because it is nice to have a debian-esque system running the latest and greatest KDE without the headaches of now having to have stuff from Experimental, other stuff from SID just to keep the desktop up to date.