Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pompino 720 days ago
Just to put things in perspective - MacOS forces you to run on their update treadmill for the OS, and you can't even update your xcode dev environment if you refuse. Ditto with Linux, you can't refuse OS updates if you use a package manager because eventually you can't update anything without accepting all the dependencies. Windows for all its warts did do something well with binary compatibility. I am happy as a pig in poop with my work supplied LTSC install.
2 comments
hot_gril 720 days ago
MacOS doesn't force updates for general users. But if you want to run the latest Xcode, yeah you need the latest OS.
link
pompino 719 days ago
Its funny that a compiler forces you to update your OS.
link
hot_gril 719 days ago
It's a lot more than a compiler.
link
pompino 718 days ago
Yes it has an editor and a debugger, and some other stuff. So what? Its still an application. An application forcing you to update your OS would be laughed out of the room in any other situation. Personally I wouldn't defend such a broken design, but to each his own.
link
viraptor 720 days ago
Sorry, but the Linux part doesn't make sense. If you want to update system components from the system repository, it makes sense that the dependencies are rolled into it. But if you don't want to upgrade everything, you don't have to. Install a specific app version from flatpak, download binaries, or compile it yourself for your current system. You have so many ways to do this - same as you're doing on windows.
link
pompino 719 days ago
>Install a specific app version from flatpak, download binaries, or compile it yourself for your current system.

Then you can't have those dependencies managed by a package manager, which means you'll constantly be compiling (and dealing with conflicts yourself). This is not a viable path forward as it seems to be presented here.

>You have so many ways to do this - same as you're doing on windows.

On Windows I copy a binary and run it w/o giving a crap about the OS updates. Vastly different workflows for it to be called "same".

link
viraptor 719 days ago
> On Windows I copy a binary and run it w/o giving a crap about the OS updates.

You don't just copy the binary on windows. You copy the binary and its dependencies. Unless it's based on .Net-framework, then yeah, you still care about it being updated through windows.

> Then you can't have those dependencies managed by a package manager, which means you'll constantly be compiling (and dealing with conflicts yourself).

That's not right. You don't need to use dependencies from the system. If you're compiling yourself, you can either make them static, or use your custom location. In either case, there are no conflicts to deal with.

If you're using whole app packages, then you don't care about system deps at all. Flatpak apps ship their whole environment. AppImage apps do too, just without full isolation. (https://appimage.github.io/apps/ entries are all "download-and-run")

link
pompino 718 days ago
>You don't just copy the binary on windows. You copy the binary and its dependencies. Unless it's based on .Net-framework, then yeah, you still care about it being updated through windows.

Sure, but I can install s/w built for Windows XP into Windows 11 and it will just run 20 years later w/o modification - And I can do this with a large amount of commercial software, so its not a special case example which you can demonstrate on any OS. Simply not possible on any other desktop OS. Even if you have the source (which you won't for commercial s/w), its not just a simple recompile after 20 years.

>You don't need to use dependencies from the system. If you're compiling yourself, you can either make them static, or use your custom location. In either case, there are no conflicts to deal with

Static linking glibc.. yeah. :)

>If you're using whole app packages, then you don't care about system deps at all. Flatpak apps ship their whole environment. AppImage apps do too, just without full isolation. (https://appimage.github.io/apps/ entries are all "download-and-run")

Yet another "standard" that ultimately will fracture the deployment of software. These are just buggy half-baked standards anyway. Vendor releases 32bit AppImage and goes out of business, it stops working on 64bit OS.

I don't think you guys really get the insane backwards compatibility effort that Microsoft does to help keep line of business applications running.

link