Video download link | md5sum fd062d1d0d808e4bea247ad11775cddc Gemini Entering Distro Repositories Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Amidst our negotiations with Richard Stallman (about adding Gemini presence for GNU and the FSF; still "work in progress") we're seeing a lot of enthusiasm from the GNU/Linux community at large; hackers and hobbyists are offering to package and maintain popular Gemini clients, even for large corporations such as IBM (Fedora)

EARLIER this week we noted in IRC and in Daily Links that Michel Salim had packaged Lagrange for Fedora; Lagrange already has an AppImage and for over a year there has been Flatpak in the mix, so Lagrange wasn't so hard to install in Fedora regardless.

"Thankfully the situation is improving and owing to the growth/increasing relevance of Geminispace the demand (from users) will compel packaging or make more volunteers (to package software of interest)."As noted in the video above, this is part of a trend. Last night I spent about an hour taking stock of which Gemini clients are available for which OS or distro (BSDs and GNU/Linux, but I noticed macOS too along the way). The situation isn't great -- especially for lack of packages -- but it is improving over time. In Arch Linux, for example, Castor (Rust, GTK), Kristall (C++, Qt), and Lagrange (C, SDL) are among the properly packaged "[g]raphical clients" for Gemini. For the terminal they offer amfora (Go), asuka-git (Rust), av-98 (Python), bombadillo-git (Go), and Elpher (Emacs). And through the XBPS package manager one can get Castor for Void Linux. Debian and Ubuntu are still MIA and even OpenBSD offers more options than they do. Thankfully the situation is improving and owing to the growth/increasing relevance of Geminispace the demand (from users) will compel packaging or make more volunteers (to package software of interest). I'll continue to 'monitor the situation' and occasionally report on it, mostly as an enthusiast of gemini:// whose audience nowadays includes a lot of Gemini users (in the video above I show that we still attract a lot of traffic over gemini:// protocol).

"This post is day 17 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge," Michel Salim wrote in the Fediverse. And he added the hastag #Web0 (alluding to the counterculture of Aral Balkan and his partner Laura).

"Web0" is an amusing synonym of the "small Web" as Balkan calls it (promoting lots of JavaScript). It has nothing to do with Gopher, Gemini etc. Like the Web's founder, he's trying to compensate for the Web's bloat with more bloat or another kind of bloat. ⬆