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> This is not an acceptable way to install anything on Linux

You might want to tell the rest of the software world how unnacceptable it is, because a huge amount of software, and especially dev tooling, is installed in this exact way.

It's especially hard for young or fast moving projects, most distro packaging just isn't very compatible with this velocity.

I'm personally on NixOS , which usually makes it easy to always get the latest and greatest, but eg would I really want to add a third party apt repository for Zed, which introduces complications and also can make changes to my whole system, rather than just having zed install itself in a local user-owned directory? I don't want to end up with 15 different third party apt repositories... adding those actually provides a higher amount of trust than shell scripts that only run with user permissions.

And there are similar considerations for most other distros. Arch is probably the only other one, next to nix, where it's quite easy to stay up to date.

(zed is already an official Arch package, btw, and before that it already was in aur, and of course it is in nixpkgs already)

It's not ideal, but whenever some pattern propagates across the ecosystem, there are probably valid reasons why.



Almost 70% of the male population in my country smokes. Should I take up smoking because everybody else does it?


>I don't want to end up with 15 different third party apt repositories

I would love to add 15 different third party apt repositories, I wish more projects used them, you're running whatever binary they give you anyway

I guess this is just another example of how hard it is to please all linux users!


Running a binary in userspace is quite different from giving a third party unconstrained root access to your system though.

To be fair though, with the lack of security and isolation on Linux a malicious binary can already do a huge amount of damage.




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