1. you need libraries and their headers while compiling stuff
2. --xv is more likely to be -xv. -- is for long version of options like --verbose, - for short like -v
3. gstreamer may need other subpackages for some codecs like gstreamer-ugly
Is linux always like this or am I a brainlet?
Ethan Hughes
Evan Perry
Meh, the spyware is mostly contained in the whoopsie package.
I agree the UI is bullshit though. Better put up with KDE's bugs or use xfce4 or mate.
(not him)
Because Linux is a piece of shit, and the only way to make it somewhat bearable is to use Ubuntu with one of the DEs I mentioned above. All other distros are memes which don't work any better in reality. KDE Neon Stable is kinda nice since it seems to be less buggy than the KDE packages in the normal Ubuntu repos.
Elijah Brown
Just to extend on this, today I installed three IDEs through apt to work on some C code.
Out of the three, one doesn't start at all (Eclipse), the other shows the logo and crashes (Netbeans), and the third works for a while and randomly crashes every now and then (Codeblocks). I don't know about the first two, but the third one I think is a bug that I've seen happen on other computers as well, and has gone unfixed for years.
So yeah, being a buggy, broken piece of shit is nothing original in the Linux world.
Jason Baker
You might have been better to start with Ubuntu or Mint while you get used to the differences between Linux and Windows. Salix is based on Slackware, the main difference between the two is Salix only includes one application per task for a more trim system. Slackware and most of it's derivatives are best suited at users who know the Linux ecosystem fairly well and prefer to manage everything themselves, right down to dependency management. Unlike Slackware, Salix comes with a package manager, slapt-get, which does have rudimentary dependency resolution. So rather than go through the trouble of compiling lynx and it's dependencies right off the bat, try (as root) "slapt-get --install lynx".
for your mp3 problems, many codecs can't be included due to license restrictions in some countries. Try (again, as root) "slapt-get --install gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly ffmpeg gst-ffmpeg" and that should take care of most of your media codec needs.
Dominic King
All of the above, install gentoo
Jose Perez
That is how a distro will function without a package manager that handles dependencies, although most package managers are really quite horrible at managing dependencies. Yes, you uncovered the suck, now you'll learn about how people refuse to statically compile anything and dump it on their website because there is someone out there on MIPS somewhere and we have to cater to them specifically, and also someone on their 40MB HDD cannot fit a statically linked program on it, because that use case still exists somewhere on Earth. Also, some library might be out of date, so you should use this distribution where every package is out of date (but it has muh security backports!) in order to solve the problem.
The GNU userland is designed for someone using Vim or Emacs or other text editors alongside a bunch of Unix-like tools, there is no serious attempt to make a cohesive desktop environment anymore (I would not classify KDE or GNOME as "serious", and the rest are even less so). The only other option is to use Wine if the program has good compatibility.
MP3 patents have expired from what I understand, most projects should have no reason to not include MP3 stuff now.
Linux is a pretty good kernel that is great at memory management and has many features, GNU only makes sense if you are using Emacs and/or bash (or a suitable alternative shell) as an environment, with some X11 window dressing if you like.
Zachary Reyes
Hah, yeah. The "muh security" argument never made sense to me. Can you even drop in an .so replacement for a new version of a library and expect it to work? I'd guess it'd break 99% of the time. Not even Microsoft manages backwards binary compatibility in their libraries, they just bundle all the old versions of a library you might need with the OS and call it a day.
That said, statically linked programs consume more RAM than their counterparts, because they can't share memory between other programs using the same libraries, and take longer to start because they can't use the libraries loaded by other programs into memory already.
The kernel itself might be good, but the driver support for anything more complicated than a TTY and an Ethernet card is appalling.
Blake Ortiz
Colton Carter
Ryder White
Neither, you just picked a distro that expects you to know what you are doing, while you don't know what you are doing. Pick a noob-friendly distro like Ubuntu (or one of its flavors if you don't like Gnome) or Linux Mint, or something like that. Once you get the hang of how things fit together you can take off the training wheels and move to a more advanced distro.
That's the sort of shit why I don't bother with IDEs, too many things that can break. With a text editor + plugins + makefiles you can always work. Even if some of your plugins fail you can just remove them and carry on; it won't be as convenient, but it will let you get work done.
Part of the Windows brain damage is following instructions sheepishly: click this button, copy-paste this magic command, download this mystery binary... Then they read somewhere about how Ubuntu sucks and makes you gay, and how this obscure elite hacker distro is much better, so they install it and hope there will be the same sheepish instructions waiting for them in the GNU/Linux world as well.
This is why I think that Ubuntu and other noob-friendly distros are fine for beginners. There is a safety net that will let you still use the system while you are figuring it out, instead of expecting you to read a hundred pages worth of manpages before you can even set up a user account.