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by AnthonyMouse
1916 days ago
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Aren't you just describing a package manager or an app store? The reason mobile app stores are garbage is that the store is glued to the platform, making it high-friction to switch to another one if they do a bad job. Then they do a bad job by allowing things you don't want and prohibiting things you do want (and charging high fees etc.) and get away with it. There is no reason for this to be centralized into a single approver. If you got 90% of your software through the Debian package manager but specifically need a newer version of Blender than they package, you could get that in particular directly from the Blender developers because you trust them not to intentionally distribute malicious code, while still relying on the package maintainers to do the work for all the other software you use. That's possible right now on Linux. The problem is mostly that it's not possible right now on everything. |
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My wish came from the opposite end - I have all this software on my devices that's sourced from a lot of different places, and some of the software on my PC has built-in auto-update that's independent of the original installation method. What I want is a curation add-on - a single (at least per-device) component that would intercept all automatic updates of everything, coupled with a database (the service part) that could tell me roughly what the update contains, and flag anything problematic (telemetry, ads, feature removals, performance degradation, ...).
Your reply made me realize two things:
1. I used to hate default package sources on Debian for shipping a small selection of outdated software. I formed this impression back when I was young and naïve, and didn't question it since. But now I can see the value in having actual humans curate the software. I need to get out of the habit of adding random sources and PPAs just for the sake of having everything bleeding edge.
2. I'm really mostly pissed about this on behalf of other people. I've learned to manage my devices - mostly by being very selective about the software I run. Most people I know in the meatspace don't have the necessary experience and time, and helping everyone individually doesn't scale.