[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I think that's a good example of how the whole paradigm of package management as an application distribution mechanism (at least as implemented) is really terrible. What good is all this management if I have to bypass it and everything it supposedly provides just to get up to date software, or two versions of the same software?

[alanfranzoni]

I totally agree with you. I think it's pretty pointless to have terabytes of repos for software that then grows stale.

But distributions often say that it's the only way to keep the whole "ecosystem" of a distribution stable.

So? What I think is that Linux "distributions" are growing less and less useful nowadays. On the desktop, no Linux was able to gain significant traction, and many developers are just using Macs and Windows with WSL.

On the server side, ways to "build your own distro" for creating a tuned stack for your purposes ( read: docker images ) exist and seem more useful than standard distro components. Nixos is another take.

Yes, "just apt install foo" is nice, until it isn't. I think we're at a tipping point between the old and new approach.

[jancsika]

> But distributions often say that it's the only way to keep the whole "ecosystem" of a distribution stable.

In practice, it doesn't work. I did a Debian Stretch `apt-get upgrade` and it pulled in a new version of firefox-esr that did not run on my Rockchip Chromebook. Debian was forced to do it because it was end-of-life for the older firefox-esr, and Debian's security backports policy doesn't scale for projects like Chromium and Firefox.