[fragmede]

Do people still fight with dependencies?

Apt or dnf or some other package manager (like yum or pacman) comes preconfigured and preinstalled on all but the most esoteric Linux distros, so unless you're doing some really esoteric stuff, if you're fighting with dependencies, I would assume something's gone wrong.

Which is to say, it still certainly possible to fall into dependency hell in this day and age, but the parent response belies a certain level of fear of installing things on Linux because of dependencies. I hear Windows still has this problem, decades later, and while Linux has it's own share of foibles, installing pre-packaged software is generally not the exciting/frustrating part. (Which Docker has made even easier!)

[nikofeyn]

a recent example for me is that i want to install some stuff on an embedded linux that runs opkg and doesn’t have apt. now all of the instructions for the thing i want to build just point to apt installation commands. they do provide instructions to build from source, but now i am immediately in dependency hell. it isn’t clear at all how to get all the dependencies even installed, much less properly, as they also have their own dependency hell instructions.

and as a developer who primarily develops on windows, windows itself doesn’t have any “dependency” problem really. it’s all the people who basically write their software on and for linux and then haphazardly try to make it work on windows through a series of hacks while claiming support for windows.

when you come across maintainers who take both linux and windows seriously, you just run an installer and get on with your life.

[khedoros1]

opkg itself looks like a competent package manager. If the software selection of the repositories for the device you were working with is any good, then it might take some work to find equivalent packages, but opkg should still handle resolution of the dependencies.

Then again, the more esoteric the platform, or the less frequently a particular piece of software is wanted on that platform, the more friction you'll have to overcome.

Find a Windows for MIPS (or whatever that embedded Linux is running on) and tell me that getting equivalent software running is easier.