| ▲ | kccqzy 14 hours ago |
| Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged. |
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| ▲ | Rohansi 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed. |
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| ▲ | kccqzy 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not my point. My point is that if executable A depends on library B, and library B does not provide any stable ABI, then the package manager will take care of updating A whenever updating B. Windows has fanatical commitment to ABI stability, so the situation above does not even occur. As a user, all the hard work dealing with ABI breakages on Linux are done by the people managing the software repos, not by the user or by the developer. I'm personally very appreciative of this fact. | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi an hour ago | parent [-] | | Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's certainly not ideal. How much time and energy is being wasted by libraries like that? Wouldn't it be better if library B had a stable ABI or was versioned? Is there any reason it needs to work like this? |
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| ▲ | grishka 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What if you want to use a newer or older version of just one package without having to update or downgrade the entire goddamn universe? What if you need to use proprietary software? I've had so much trouble with package managers that I'm not even sure they are a good idea to begin with. |
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| ▲ | Maskawanian 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I know you are trying to make a point about complexity, but that is literally what NixOS allows for. | | |
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