Show HN: Lilite, a Linux package autoinstaller

Show HN: Lilite, a Linux package autoinstaller(lilite.co)

4 points by c_moscardi 9 years ago | 3 comments

tprata 9 years ago |

While I understand where you're coming from, package management and install shouldn't really be a fun thing. One of the core benefits of linux is having every package at the distance of a command, on the same place, without needing external sites and downloads. I can understand that for some new users this is alien, but it is a necessary, and useful in the end, adaptation that they have to make. And finally, since this would be dedicated to new users, since olders one would just take the simple path of creating the shell script, NEVER TEACH A NEW USER TO JUST curl * | BASH. That's a criminal sin right there

c_moscardi 9 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback! I wasn't particularly dedicating this to new users. This solves a problem for me, an experienced *nix user. I'm not even sure it /would/ solve a problem for new users (arguably ninite doesn't either) - you need to know what packages you care about in order to have an interest in downloading them.

This site gives me an interface to say, "oh yeah, I /do/ need VLC on this laptop, come to think of it", rather than having to lazy-evaluate that when I have a video downloaded and realize I don't currently have a means of playing it.

I spend a fair bit of time doing DevOps work, and this isn't meant to be some sort of configuration management or provisioning tool. This is for desktop / dev users, which is, I think, quite a different use case (but an increasingly relevant one). I have a dotfiles repo, which is to say I'm familiar with the "document things in scripts and repos" game - but it's not clear to me that something like a script-as-documentation is even a useful process to go through when any given computer I set up is going to be used differently. That laptop playing VLC is very different than the web dev box I spin up to mess around with a new project.

c_moscardi 9 years ago |

Hi all, I created this site!

The motivation was basically a version of ninite[1] for Linux. So very desktop-focused. I actually got in touch with the ninite folks, who used to run a Linux installer [2]. They said there wasn't enough interest and package managers are "good enough." I respectfully disagree on that point - I think that having the ability to point-and-click for the core, most important packages you want to install is really useful when you're spinning up a new desktop from scratch.

I was running into this problem after basically doing ad-hoc setup for every new machine I turned on. Sure - I could write a shell script / list of packages and save it to my dotfiles repo, but where would the fun be in that? :)

(Plus, package lists on every machine are different)

[1] https://ninite.com/ [2] https://ninite.com/linux