What about better ideas like installing from source, or using a package manager? Or even flatpaks.

From source: creates much more work for the user.

Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.

Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.

If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.

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tovej 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Bullshit.

There's plenty of big projects that don't suggest you curl a script right into your shell.

If you have curl, you're probably on Linux. Just use the package manager like an adult.

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arbll 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The "like an adult" is what has and will continue to hold back linux on the desktop. Always gatekeeping less technical users instead of acknowledging adoption and ease of use are critical.

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pluralmonad an hour ago | parent [-]

Is this stance gate keeping users? Isn't a pkg manager installation also a one liner? This seems more like gate keeping lazy distributors.

	▲	arbll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of those scripts are wrappers around package managers. Creating them is extra work for distributors, but they still do it because package-manager installs are not truly one-liners and offer far less control over the installation experience. Users need to figure out which of the 10+ package managers they should be using, then run several commands. If something fails, the error messages are often cryptic and not easily configurable by the distributor. And that’s before getting into the many rough edges of package managers. Most of them flat-out refuse to handle configuration and leave that part to the end user. Now you also need to document how to edit YAML and restart a systemd service. With an install script this is also solved. For power users, this always looks trivial. In practice it raises the barrier to entry and can meaningfully affect adoption if your product is often used by less technical people.

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mik3y 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The ideas aren't mutually exclusive, and I've never seen an open source project support "curl | sh" without also supporting those methods.

Indeed, plenty of these scripts often act as a "what OS and packager do we have" mux. Just look at the source of this one, for example.

When you support an open source project at scale and/or with less savvy users, you come to see the benefit of "here, just f'ing slam this into your shell and we'll figure it out" installers. I know I have.