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by barrkel 5203 days ago
I use Linux every day; I haven't used desktop Linux much since a fairly unpleasant experience with the original Eee PC (701, in 2007).

But package management (I live with Debian apt-get and friends) is a bane of my life. Generally, the binaries that come when I install a package are too old, or don't have the right compile-time options configured, or there is some dependency missing that I don't have installed and is for some reason missing in the repository due to bitrot. It's usually more reliable to download the source, configure, build and install it the old-fashioned way. That also means fixing build errors, tracking down missing libraries, and generally a whole load of work I wouldn't trust an otherwise fairly competent software engineer to do, never mind the average user.

3 comments

What distro do you use? It's very much not my experience on Debian (Sid).
You use debian and are complaining about old binaries? I think they consider it a feature.

I use Ubuntu desktop/server and etc and my experiences with the package managers have been flawless.

The Eee PC Linux install was terrible. I installed Ubuntu almost immediately.
Yes; first I reenabled the underlying UI so that I had access to a console; soon after I installed Eeebuntu when it was put together by the community. I never used the original limited UI for more than perhaps 60 minutes total.