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by hs86
1868 days ago
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Having a system-wide package manager where nearly all libraries are dynamically linked also has its drawbacks. A seemingly minor update might cause a huge cascade of dependency updates which causes common Linux distributions to tend to one of these two extreme solutions:
Either fix all packages in place and freeze their version numbers or just "give up" and update everything all the time. Both solutions feel like compromises to me. Other end-user OSes don't act like this. On Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, I can have the latest 3rd party software without having to deal with intrusive updates to the OS infrastructure all the time.
The BSDs handle this better, and maybe something like Ubuntu LTS + Nix on top of it might be a way around this. |
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That's not really true. The .NET runtime isn't redistributable, and so has to be installed on the host OS, which usually works but not always (and pre-Windows 10, newer versions of .NET required a bunch of KBs, which meant that Windows Update was actually working and able to install those, which fairly frequently broke on Windows 7 due to the lack of Service Packs). Nowadays this is less of a problem, due to improved .NET compatibility and .NET 4.x coming pre-installed on Windows 10. Which honestly is great - you can compile and run .NET 4.x programs on any Windows 10 machine. Granted, it's some relatively outdated version by now, but it is still very nice to have a "proper" programming language out of the box, and also the ability to compile to small .exe's.
Similarly, MSVC runtimes (except the installers are redistributable, but you are still in the situation of "have to globally install it").