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In my experience, recently developed applications are rarely in Apt and use one of the above listed distribution methods. My counter-point to the parent is tha

by Osiris 5y ago

In my experience, recently developed applications are rarely in Apt and use one of the above listed distribution methods. My counter-point to the parent is that installing software in Linux is NOT objectively better, in the sense that it's easier. Software that targets Linux almost always comes with installation instructions one must read (I'm not referring to the normal utilities, etc that have been around forever).

southerntofu 5y ago
As an end-user who's barely involved in packaging anything, i strongly disagree with your point. On free systems, installing a package can either be super easy (apt install from official repos) or harder and you have to read instructions. It is harder to install software that has not been reviewed/vetted (yet) and as a user i believe that's a very good thing. That's the only reason out of the many non-technical GNU/Linux users i know, i've never even once seen a virus like i have seen the same people get on Windows/Mac. "Download & run" untrusted code from the Internet is very much an anti-pattern for security. I'm really glad AppImage exists for some usecases (as it does support PGP signatures for releases), but i'm really glad it's not the go-to method for releasing software. Also worth noting, there's exactly one reasonably-secure alternative to distro packages, and that's GNU/guix, another distro inspired by nix but with much higher security standards (bootstrappability, "channel introductions", etc). Maybe some day our distros will be packaged with GNU/guix and a GNOME Software (or equivalent) backend for graphical usage?
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laumars 5y ago
I’d estimate that I need to read install instructions for maybe 1 in 20 pieces of software I install on desktop Linux (server is a little different because you’ll have config files that need to be coded in Ansible etc but we are talking desktop OSs anyways). Whereas if it wasn’t for homebrew, an unofficial hack, it would be 100% of software on macOS. That doesn’t strike me as Linux being particularly worse.

by Osiris 5y ago

southerntofu 5y ago

As an end-user who's barely involved in packaging anything, i strongly disagree with your point. On free systems, installing a package can either be super easy (apt install from official repos) or harder and you have to read instructions. It is harder to install software that has not been reviewed/vetted (yet) and as a user i believe that's a very good thing. That's the only reason out of the many non-technical GNU/Linux users i know, i've never even once seen a virus like i have seen the same people get on Windows/Mac. "Download & run" untrusted code from the Internet is very much an anti-pattern for security. I'm really glad AppImage exists for some usecases (as it does support PGP signatures for releases), but i'm really glad it's not the go-to method for releasing software. Also worth noting, there's exactly one reasonably-secure alternative to distro packages, and that's GNU/guix, another distro inspired by nix but with much higher security standards (bootstrappability, "channel introductions", etc). Maybe some day our distros will be packaged with GNU/guix and a GNOME Software (or equivalent) backend for graphical usage?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

laumars 5y ago

I’d estimate that I need to read install instructions for maybe 1 in 20 pieces of software I install on desktop Linux (server is a little different because you’ll have config files that need to be coded in Ansible etc but we are talking desktop OSs anyways). Whereas if it wasn’t for homebrew, an unofficial hack, it would be 100% of software on macOS. That doesn’t strike me as Linux being particularly worse.