[alerighi]

Honestly, the fact that to install software you have to go on a site, download an installer, and run it, is one of the reasons why I don't like Windows.

Not only that thing is time consuming and cannot be easily automated, but it's error prone, you are likely to find in the first Google results not the official website of the software but some other site like Softonic that with the software also installs bloatware/malware/toolbars/etc. Of course an expert user can distinguish the official site from a scam, but usually the average computer user can't.

What I like about Linux is just that you type in a terminal (or you use one of the many GUI that exist) `sudo apt install <software name>` and a version of that software, along with its dependencies, it is installed. And not only installed, but packaged, if needed patched, and tested to work along with other software in the distribution. When I install Windows I spend at least 1 hours going to every website of software that I need, download the installer, run the installer, click next, next, next, and repeat. With Linux I can just type in a single command every software that I need, let it run and install it, while I do other things.

And when you need to uninstall a software? On Windows you need the uninstaller, that if it was not created correctly, or created at all, will leave a lot of stuff on the system, files, registry keys, broken links, cache files, etc that you need to remove either manually or with some "cleaner" programs that do more harm than good, for that reason an installation of Windows needs to be formatted every X years cause of the accumulated crap.

From a developer point of view, and I've done many times, writing an installer for Windows, even using open source frameworks like NSIS, is a manual operation that is time consuming, can induce in errors, you need to learn a specific scripting language, etc, while making a package for Ubuntu/Debian (for example) is a simple operation, as simple as put the files of your software in a directory, put in a metadata file, and launch a command to produce the package. Most build systems (automake, cmake) already can create deb packages automatically with commonly used plugins.

[the__alchemist]

Anecdote: Most of the software I use isn't available in `apt`, or the version there is dated. I prefer to get software from its official source, not a third party I don't know will have the current or any versions. And, there is more to software than free/OSS.

[popol12]

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt.

Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

[j_w]

The AUR really is night and day compared to other package managers. Official packages get updates FAST, user packages typically not much slower.

Issues with new versions get immediate solutions on the forums, so breaking changes hardly impact you if you just check the front page of the forums when they do happen.

Arch has the reputation of being the hardcore distro, but really its so user friendly to manage after the initial setup (and I think they have an "easy" setup process if you don't want to manually configure everything now).

[bobajeff]

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates.

Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

[j_w]

Since I've started daily driving Arch on my personal machine I've had two instances that I can recall of a breaking change, both related to an NVIDIA driver update relying on some package that for whatever reason couldn't be bundled with the NVIDIA driver package. On the front page of the forums the fix was immediately available.

The reputation that things are always breaking just doesn't have merit anymore.

[tombert]

You might look into NixOS unstable.

Its packages are generally pretty up to date, like Arch, but every update/rebuild snapshots the current system.

I find this pretty wonderful; if I am mucking around with packages or boot parameters or whatever, it’s way less scary; if I break something I simply reboot and choose an older generation.

[popol12]

I was scared too and found out that it's actually the opposite !

I'm using Manjaro (derived from Arch), so I can't talk for Arch itself but so far (2 years) it's been way more friendly to me than Ubuntu (which I used for 7 years before).

[bobajeff]

Long ago manjaro was my favorite distro because it had a lot of great defaults that are rare among distros. The thing I didn't like was always having to be on top of updates or the update system would break and fixing it was a process. However, the thing that made me stop altogether was that one update caused my Keyboard to stop working!

[pidgeon_lover]

The Windows way, the software will always be available and will work "forever" from that installer. Archive to disk, reinstall in 30 years. Everything installs to a few easy-to-find paths, and the community support is amazing thanks to the largest userbase of all operating systems. Windows has its telemetry and update problems, but if you're not violating Microsoft's EULAs and hacking your own PC (with easy-to-use GUIs), you're not using it right.

The Linux way, the maintainers will archive your DEB or one of its dependencies and it will disappear - your business-critical machine now no longer works. You will not be able to reinstall it when travelling without an internet connection. The developer of another program might be Russian and now for political reasons his server is blocked/censored, so you can no longer install his software. Another developer changes the EULA and implements AI and mandatory telemetry and backdoors to the Five Eyes - your Linux system auto-updates and now you're pwned. You install a rolling release Linux and it updates endlessly until your CPU performance is compromised (see how Win10/11/iOS updates); you try to roll back and your software and dependencies all break (unfixable because APT installed them God-knows-where all over your system); when fixed, you find that because of the rolling release, you can't find the specific "last-good-version" of that one tool.