Anki on chromeboook

Syncing & AnkiWeb
9

I did not know what “Linux Development Environment” was, so I googled it (of course), and found this page. It starts with

Linux is a feature that lets you develop software using your Chromebook.

Which is very strange. Later on, I see apt related commands, so I suppose the package manager is Debian’s apt. However, I searched on wikipedia too, and found that Chrome OS is based on Gentoo, whose package manager is emerge…

The conclusion of all of this is that I did not understood how exactly do you install packages? Do you use apt? Do you use emerge? Do you know what repositories you are using anyways?

However, in the case you are using the apt command, it is most likely that you are using either Debian or Ubuntu repositories, neither of which is know for being on the bleeding edge side. This means that you may want to install Anki an other way. I see at least three possible ways (I would recommend trying them in the given order)

  1. Download the binary, then simply execute it.
    • Advantages:
      • easy
      • requires at most 3 minutes (depending on you internet speed)
    • Disadvantages:
      • no auto-update feature
      • no wrapping, meaning you have to manually seek for the binary and execute it, or place it by yourself in a directory in PATH, or however you launch other applications normally
      • only works if there is a pre-built version of Anki for your architecture
  2. Install via pip
    • Advantages:
      • easy
      • does some wrapping
      • update is much easier
      • should not be too long
    • Disadvantages:
      • requires pip, but it should be packaged, no matter what package manager you are using
      • still requires a bit of handcrafted wrapping, depending on how you launch your applications
  3. Install a concurrent package manager, then install Anki via it
    • Advantages:
      • does all wrapping
      • update is automatic
      • might be helpful if you encounter the same issues with other packages (besides Anki I mean)
      • there are a lot of concurrent package manager, so you can chose the one that fits you best
    • Disadvantages:
      • considerably longer to setup the first time
      • there are a lot of concurrent package manager, so Anki is probably not packaged for all of them, you’ll have to look for one that has Anki
      • might not be completely integrated with the rest of the Chromebook
      • requires a concurrent package manager, which is of course heavier than just installing Anki.

Some package manager that are distro-agnostic are

  • Snapcraft, which does package the very last version of Anki (atm, 2.1.49)
  • Flatpak, which does package the latest stable version of Anki (atm, 2.1.48) and which explicitely supports Chrome OS, and therefore Chromebooks (meaning the integration is likely to be better, although maybe others are well integrated too, idk)
  • Nix, which does package the very last version of Anki (atm, 2.1.49) (warning: the latest version is packaged under the name anki-bin. anki is an older version) and which explicitely supports Chrome OS. nix is considerably harder to use that snap or flatpak, but has more features (an entire OS is built around).
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