Started to write this in dwarf mode sub forum but thought it belonged here better.
This is an opinion/review piece on running DF on windows vs linux and the gist of it is in the title.
My most recent foray into DF was with 0.34.11 mid last year, Windows 7. Not knowing the latest graphics sets, utils, (back then DT didn't exist or was under a diff name) etc etc, I did some basic search on the wiki, dled the LazyNewbPack and got into DF with phoebus within 5 minutes. I toyed with stonesense, DT, dfhack and soundsense, loved them all.
Just this month, I've been transitioning to ubuntu and one of the first things I wanted to try was DF. It's taken me 2-3 solid hours figuring out how to get DT (compiled from latest source as there isn't a binary of DT 20.4), dfhack 0.34.11 r3, DF itself working on ubuntu.
I still haven't gotten stonesense working (my alegro lib is seg faulting, more googling required) and haven't tried soundsense yet.
Given that alot of it was also just getting familiar with terminal commands again, it still felt like a massive battle to get it working together. the wiki's linux install instructions conflicted with DT's (i should mention this is splintermind's DT) detecting DF's version. Found out it was the editing of libs\Dwarf_Fortress for the mouse that caused the address pointer to get out of whack. also, quite a bit of old instructions so I had to dig through other's experiences which are in bits and pieces everywhere, so it just gave an impression of being fiddly to get working when compared to the windows counterpart.
With the rising popularity of ubuntu, and the increasing number of linux newbs like myself exploring the OS, I'd have thought there was a BuntuNewbPack equivalent package, ppa or deb package etc etc for DF. Or at least a script that came with the install that did all the sound linking and manual tweaks required to run DF on linux variants. I guess I'm looking for sudo apt-get DF_0.34.11_NewbPack
I'm tempted to create one myself to learn about the apt-get tool and to make installing DF a easier experience. Does one already exist? Or does it not because of the lack of need?