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What do you expect users to do in this case, when apt has old or missing software? Are users expected to limit themselves to the software in the main repositori
by josephg 5y ago
What do you expect users to do in this case, when apt has old or missing software? Are users expected to limit themselves to the software in the main repositories? Windows and macos don’t have this constraint. Installing applications from the internet never breaks windows update or macos. (Sometimes macos updates break homebrew or kernel extensions, but that’s kind of easier to deal with.)
- rlpb 5y agoUsers can only realistically do what their third party software providers tell them to do. The third party software providers, however, owe it to their users to provide reliable and responsible mechanisms for users to consume their stuff. Providing a third party apt repository that breaks the user doing a future release upgrade is not it. Now we have snaps, AppImage, Flatpak. These mechanisms can be used by third party software providers to provide safe and reliable (for the system) software. Any of them are better than providing third party apt repositories. > Windows and macos don’t have this constraint. Installing applications from the internet never breaks windows update or macos. That's because it isn't the norm for third party software to hack up the OS in order to install themselves, rather than use the mechanisms provided. It used to be - remember DLL hell? They got away from that, and our ecosystem needs to do the same.