linuxmemes

Investigating further I think I do see your issue. You started out installing software the way you do on Windows: Going out to the vendor's website and downloading a .exe. I went straight to my distro's package manager and installed a .deb, which worked fine...even if I got a 4-year old version of the software.

I will notice that on chrip.danplanet.com, it does briefly mention the legacy version can be installed "On Linux, via flatpak" which doesn't seem to be true at least anymore; neither Mint's software manager nor flathub.org return any relevant hits for "chirp."

Let's see if I can get it installed on my Mint machine by simply copy-pasting the commands listed on this page.

One criticism I can level right now about this tutorial page: Step 1. Install Distro Packages branches, you're supposed to use the APT command if using Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc . or the DNF command if using Fedora and compatible (which would include Red Hat, Nobara etc. Instructions for Arch-based distros are not included, I suppose if you Arch btw you don't need them. It's probably in the AUR. Point is this is a branching path, but doesn't have a 1.1 or 1.2. Next up, under Install CHIRP (and Python dependencies) this also branches, but has a 2.1 and 2.2 notation. My distro, Mint 21.1, is based on Ubuntu 22.04, so I cound in the Ubuntu 22.10 and earlier section, so I'll run that command.

It returns an error, and on further examination, it's pretty clear as to why. PIP is Python's package manager, which can and usually does download packages from a central repository, but in this case the ./ in the command means its looking for a file in this directory. Just above this, in a place that doesn't look like a step in this process, it's telling us to download the latest .tar.gz from another page.

So I go to this page and download the chirp-20231223-py3-none-any.whl file, noticing that this is a different file name than the one listed in the tutorial command. Since I used Firefox to download this file, I know that it landed in my ~/Downloads folder. I cd ~/Downloads, then run the pip command, substituting the name of the file I just downloaded.

The next instruction is to run ~/.local/bin/chirp, so it apparently installed it in the .local/bin hidden directory. Running that command launched the program successfully. It prompted me if I wanted to create a desktop icon, which isn't exactly what this did. What it did was create a .desktop file, which added CHIRP to my application menu...which is what I wanted it to do anyway. But I could have done this manually because it told me what the command to launch the program was.

The documentation isn't 100% straightforward. The formatting of two different either/or branches are not formatted similarly, and the "download the file" part doesn't look like a step, it's mentioned in insufficient detail as part of the description of the next step. There isn't enough information in this tutorial alone to figure this out, you have to have looked around the site a bit and have some experience doing this to figure it out.

This is also a personal note, but I would prefer that end-user applications not be installed with PIP. If you're not going to publish to the native package formats like .deb or .rpm, I would prefer you published a Flatpak on Flathub, or if you're being really lazy an appimage.

I think I'm going to contact the webmaster here with these critiques, to hopefully make it more consistent and clearer.