Merits or demerits of installing methods: official, debian or snap?

New to Julia
1

I’m thinking of installing Julia on Ubuntu 20.04, and wonder which method to use:

  1. apt-get install julia
  2. snap install julia --classic
  3. tar xvzf (downloaded official tgz file)

What are the merits or demerits of each method?
Eventually, I’ll be interested in having Julia work with Python or C++, and using CPU cores and/or GPU.

2

Don’t use apt. Julia is a relatively young, and thus quickly changing language. If you use apt, you will get the version of Julia that was released at the same time as your OS. This means that in a year, Julia will be on version 1.8 or so, but apt will still have 1.4. I’m not sure if snap is better, but for now, at least, I would recommend the official tgz file.

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3

There’s also a regular stream of reported bugs (some quite serious) that only affect the apt-installed version, even when the version of Julia seems otherwise identical. I love apt, but I would never use it to install Julia.

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4

Thanks for the quick responses :smiley:
I’ll use the official binary.

5

4th option: clone the source from the git repo and type make.

Advantages: will be very easy to upgrade, try feature branches, test release candidates.

Disadvantages: takes a few minutes to compile.

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