Soumitra Dutta Oxford-How install software that is not available in repositories

[soumitradutta26 (Soumitra Dutta)]

Hi Everyone, I am Soumitra Dutta an entrepreneur & photographer from Oxford. I’m trying to install some software on OpenMandriva that is not available in the official repositories. I’m not sure what the safest or recommended method is in this case—whether it’s using third-party repositories, Flatpak, AppImage, or building from source. I would really appreciate it if you could share your suggestions

Regards
Soumitra Dutta

[vulonkaaz]

It kind of is a matter of personal preference (and what method is actually available), I prefer AppImage but you may prefer Flatpak

AppImage is kinda like portable executables on Windows, it is just one file you download then execute and it just works

Flatpak kind of is a distro on top of your distro so when you use it it tends to use a bit more disk space, it usually has good first party support a lot of developers make their apps primarily for Flatpak, it integrates well with the desktop (with appimage you have to make the shortcuts in the app menu yourself), it have security benefits as flatpak apps are restricted with what they can access (that can be a double edged sword with some software)

Compiling from source is something you usually do only when nothing else is available, or if you wanna make personal changes to a software, or are an old geek with old habits, can be hard to do depending on how complex the program is, good learning experience tho

I don’t know of any third party repo meant for OpenMandriva, you do not want to add third party repos meant for other distros it can break stuff

[Hum_Had]

for me, i usually go with tarballs then appimages, there might be some software which i might need to compile from source -eg DMS- but it’s nothing that hard tbh.