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by bcrescimanno
1867 days ago
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While I think a lot of the complaints he raises here are still relevant 7 years later, it's interesting that both MacOS and Windows have trended more towards a package management system with their respective app stores--with MacOS especially discouraging downloading or running any apps from outside that ecosystem. Since one can reasonably expect to target "Windows" or "MacOS" the packages in these app stores can be maintained directly by their developers which avoids a lot of the problems that Linus talked about in this video. When you get past the surface layer concept of, "We've sort of overblown this whole package management thing," it's really an argument that the fragmentation of the distributions and shared libraries that can't reasonably be shared. Even using Arch with its rolling release model and making liberal use of the AUR for the most bleeding edge, I've found myself in exactly the situation Linus describes of needing a newer version of a package because the older one flat out doesn't work for me. I can make it work because I'm technical enough to roll my own package if I need to; but, even my wife who is pretty tech-savvy herself wouldn't be willing or able to go down that route. IMO, the fact that the conversion in these comments will be rich with opinion and debate (almost all of which will be informed and intelligent) is the crux of the problem. Too many cooks have built too many kitchens--or some such metaphor. :) |
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>> needing a newer version of a package because the older one flat out doesn't work for me
The reverse situation is also a problem. For me personally, even a bigger problem.
Imagine, you're happy with a supported Ubuntu LTS version and don't want to upgrade to a non-LTS version. If there's a new version of this one package you would really like to use that targets a newer version of Ubuntu, you're out of luck, basically.
For example, maybe KDevelop replaced its home-grown C++ parsing engine with libclang. It's a huge change, you'd really like to give it a shot. Well, the only option is to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu.
Yes, there may be a PPA that has the new KDevelop targeting your LTS version. But there's an equal chance such a PPA doesn't exist. Or it has pretty much the whole set of KDE libs as its dependencies; those will not only pollute your system but also can mess up your KDE installation. Also an anonymous person made the PPA and you decide to trust them at your own risk. And when you're finally ready to upgrade, you'll have to re-add PPAs manually. Etc, etc, etc.
Snap solves both problems rather well. And in contrast to flatpak, there're official builds of VSCode and JetBrainds IDEs in the snap store. Maybe other software too -- didn't really look it up.
One problem with snap is forced updates, of course. Ubuntu developers really need to add an option to disable them.