Saturday, October 19, 2013

Where is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on PCLinuxOS?

I was dismayed to discover that there is no Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup available in PCLinuxOS's repo. Not even a version from five years ago. Not even Linley's Crawl, which was released a decade ago. This puzzles me, because the open-source game is available in Debian/Ubuntu, ArchLinux (which has the very latest release, thanks to Jakob Gruber), and now Fedora. I'm afraid that this is going to be a deal-breaker for me, because access to the latest version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is absolutely essential and non-negotiable. With perfect timing, Kubuntu just released version 13.10.

I tried my hand at being a fledgling PCLinuxOS packager myself and managed to compile Wesnoth 1.10.7 successfully, of which the geeky side of my nature is proud, but this will probably benefit no one but myself. I like the idea of helping the community, but I'm no longer sure what the process is for getting packages accepted into the repo. My hunch is that you have to know somebody. I don't really want to get into the business of having to compile the programs I want anyway. It seems tedious to me. I like having access to a well-stocked, updated repo that is accessible from a well-designed and intuitive update manager. In PCLinuxOS, the update process has proved an annoyance, because a lot of mouse clicks are required, and I am not informed of the descriptions of the packages being updated. In the Ubuntu world, the user can at least read a little blurb about each of the packages being updated.

Although PCLinuxOS provides a stable and fast KDE environment, in part I think due to the strategic decision to remain with an older Linux kernel (causing problems for users with newer hardware), my chief concerns are about the update process and the lack of software available. Just from a few weeks of use, I have noticed a glaring omission (no version of Dungeon Crawl whatsoever, outdated version of Wesnoth) and I wonder what other software I will have to learn to live without or resort to compiling myself if I continue down this road. Based on my experience here, in the future I think it may be wise to remain on the well-trodden paths of either Arch Linux or Debian.

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