Some projects only give you .tar.gz, what am I supposed to do with them? Is this what people call building from source? Am I supposed to move it to /opt and extract it in Debian based distros? Does this also work on Arch based ones?

  • Ephera
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    3 years ago

    Well, if it’s a Foxit Reader tar.gz, that’s hardly going to be the source code. Just extract it into some directory and see if there’s a file in there to start it (probably called something like “foxit-reader”).

    If that works, I would recommend moving the extracted folder to /opt and then making it available in the application menu. Some desktops, e.g. KDE Plasma, have a GUI to edit the applications. If you don’t have that, you’ll have to manually create a .desktop file: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_entries