Linux download needs installation instructions #32097

1. 
   Sjors commented at 4:34 pm on March 19, 2025: member

   Windows has an installer, macOS has the usual drag-me-to-application logic that most GUI users will be familiar with. But for Linux we just give people are bunch of binaries along with a README that lacks any installation instructions.

   Worse, it turns out the binaries don’t work out of the box on a vanilla Ubuntu system. That’s not just because of Wayland, which we don’t support yet. Even on X11 it will miss certain libraries.

   https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/14m8f9q/missing_required_library_to_run_core_on_ubuntu/

   https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/122646/libxcb-xinerama0-library-required-by-bitcoin-qt

   The easiest fix would be to point to https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#other-linux-gui which at least gives some general instructions.

   Better I think would be to add instructions for the most popular desktop distros.

   I think it’s fine to assume that daemon users can figure it out for themselves.

2. 
   hodlinator commented at 9:07 pm on March 19, 2025: contributor

   https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/122646/libxcb-xinerama0-library-required-by-bitcoin-qt

   (This seems to have led to #30061 with the same title).

3. 
   Sjors commented at 9:22 am on March 20, 2025: member

   That’s a useful reference. But the concern there is about security, i.e. the dependency on operating system libraries.

   Here I’m just worried about the practically of installing. As linux desktop gets more user friendly, I expect fewer people to know how to figure out which libraries they’re missing and how to install them.

4. willcl-ark added the label Docs on Mar 20, 2025

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