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> than have to upgrade my entire fricking OS just to get the latest Firefox. your doing it wrong

• blasdel 16y ago
  No, Debian is doing it wrong. Ubuntu is doing it wrong at a faster pace. What's wrong is the cycle of freezing all the packages for a 'release' and then 'supporting' them in the future by trying to extract 'bugfix' patches from newer versions instead of just shipping the goddamn upstream software. The answer is rolling releases and a proper slots system — look at Gentoo or Arch.
  • caf 16y ago
    If you want the upstream software as-is, nothing is stopping you from going to upstream and getting it for yourself.
    • theBobMcCormick 16y ago
      Which is fine if you're comfortable compiling from source or installing packages manually. My point is that on OSX or Windows, installing an application from "upstream", like getting the latest Firefox from Mozilla.org for example, is something even relatively non-technical users can do by themselves. On a Linux desktop, it's a "here there be dragons" operation. Not to mention that on Windows or OSX, a developer of a relatively small, obscure application (like say, HN favorite Bingo Card Creator) has a standard, relatively easy way to package their application up for installation by end users. On a Linux desktop that's really damn difficult for both the developer and the end user.
      • fungi 16y ago
        wouldn't it be harder if yo didn't have the distros standard environment to target? if the user had gone upstrem to get any significant number of packages for their system that would be very messy, no? in my experience there is nothing better then having a repo/ppa or even a well built .deb / .rpm, i wish for it every other day for my mac/win boxes.