I keep collecting little anecdotes to try to explain to folks that "X doesn't work on Linux" isn't actually a description of anything -- it might as well be word salad. There is no "linux". Today this link is added to the list: https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/trunk/docs/install_linux.md#official-sources

How/why is this innoculous looking set of help instructions for installing a bit of software a distilled simulacrum of why Linux hasn't/won't take off for desktop software, ever?

It starts with the duplication of pointless effort.

There *may* have been a time when the differences between rpms and dpkgs were material. When was that time you ask? About 2002. That was *20 years ago*.

But "linux" has no way to learn those lessons and heal.

...and then we get to the divergence within a single lineage. Commands that work on Debian might not on Ubuntu which might not work even on other apt-having systems.

Forking creates many smaller tents of similar colour, not one big tent.

In strategy speak (OODA loops), this makes it harder for everyone in the ecosystem to "orient"; you can't decide what to do until you've correctly oriented yourself to the environment, and discontinuities in the environment create new factors to include while orienting.

Cumulatively, this divergence -- whatever it's other, myriad benefits -- is a tax on consumers of software. And that tax ensures that the folks who can be part of one's ecosystem and market are restricted to folks who are willing to pay the orientation costs.

None of this is new, but all of this is tilled under in Linux discourse because to acknowledge its primacy in the (lack of) success on consumer devices is to invalidate a lot of priors. The first, and most important, being that being _right_ about software design matters most.

Anyway, all of this is to say I can't use the GH CLI in this little script w/o perpetual pain trying to get @phae's systems and mine all correctly configured over time, and there isn't a binary you can check in to make it easier.

This is why VM-based tools win.