4 ms·

Nonsense. There are essentially two conflicting ideals here: what developers want and what distros want. The problem is that distros are generally right and wha

Nonsense. There are essentially two conflicting ideals here: what developers want and what distros want. The problem is that distros are generally right and what distros want is also what users want. So it's devs against the world. Devs want to ship updates whenever they want and force them into their users' machines as soon as possible, and forget about updating dependencies and pin them to ten versions ago so they never have to eat the cost of upgrading them. Devs don't want to make sure their application plays well with others, they just want to package it up in its own universe, the user's hard drive space and bandwidth be damned. Devs never want to finish their software or declare it stable, they just want to ship their machine on Monday morning so users have it installed by Monday afternoon, just to be updated again on Wednesday. Devs want to ship spyware and adware and malware without any oversight. All of this is cheap and profitable for devs but highly antisocial. Everything is better about the distro model: security, efficiency, and stability, and they represent the users interests even when they conflict with the dev's interests. "Modern applications" are developed by children and distros are the teacher slapping them on the wrist for misbehaving. Don't bitch about it -- just grow up.

alkonaut 4y ago
As a user I just want the app to be exactly like you describe: a) isolated from all other apps b) self-updating and have a release cycle decoupled from all other apps on my system. In this scenario (for my personal desktop OS) I don't care about bandwidth, disk space or whether an app uses an out of date version of a library. Having a release per week isn't uncommon and isn't somehow a sign that an app has poor quality. I'm not going to say a generalization is dead because of one counterexample, but It's perhaps not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
- ddevault 4y ago
  As a user you are asking for a measurably worse experience. And given context, I suspect you are a developer, not just a user. A release per week is a sign that an app has poor quality.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    > As a user you are asking for a measurably worse experience. Worse than what? A program with a million features is going to have a hundred known bugs at any point. Getting ten fixed every week is better than getting 100 fixed 3 months from now. That's the thing though: as a user (not as a developer, I assure you) I want the million features, and accept the thousand bugs in order to get them. But that also means I want the weekly patches. A desktop app with 1000 features and 1 bug is good quality. As is a desktop app with a million features and the same number of bugs-to-features. You might argue that one should count bugs in the absolute, but that's just moving goalposts. With that bar there simply are no complex high-quality apps! Any useful definition of complex high quality app must be relative. > I suspect you are a developer, not just a user Indeed (this is HN after all).
    - kasabali 4y ago
      > A program with a million features is going to have a hundred known bugs at any point. Getting ten fixed every week is better than getting 100 fixed 3 months from now Ideally. In real world though it's more like fix 10, introduce 5 more. So modern software is always in constant beta. I'd rather have them release every 3 months with proper QA process in place so it'd be fix 100, introduce 20 new or something.
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    It seems wild for you to posit what users want as a sweeping generalization, have somebody say ~“that’s not what I want and here’s why”, and then just say full stop that their desires are wrong and don’t count anyway. Maybe your sweeping generalization is just wrong. Users, developers, and distro maintainers are not uniform groups with rigid pre-determined opinions and desires.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, I’m in the same boat as you. I have different thoughts in different use cases (for example, I have servers farms and other specific systems where I more strictly batch updates and value a slower cadence), but for my desktop, my mobile devices, and essentially all of my personal systems, I want constant rolling forward progress.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > As a user I just want the app to be exactly like you describe ...and with zero security. No 3rd party reviewing it for vulnerable dependencies, homecalling and telemetries or worse, or breach of licenses. No guarantee of receiving security updates. Especially given that most upstream do not maintain stable release train and do not backport security fixes. And keep in mind that flatpak sandboxing is only partially effective and it also does not protect the data you put in the sandboxed app in any way. (Not to mention that more than 4 billion people on this planet have very slow, expensive and unreliable Internet access, and old devices with limited storage space.) No thanks, I'll stick with distributions.
NoGravitas 4y ago
Thanks for the voice of sanity, Drew.

alkonaut 4y ago

As a user I just want the app to be exactly like you describe: a) isolated from all other apps b) self-updating and have a release cycle decoupled from all other apps on my system. In this scenario (for my personal desktop OS) I don't care about bandwidth, disk space or whether an app uses an out of date version of a library. Having a release per week isn't uncommon and isn't somehow a sign that an app has poor quality. I'm not going to say a generalization is dead because of one counterexample, but It's perhaps not as clear cut as you make it out to be.

ddevault 4y ago
As a user you are asking for a measurably worse experience. And given context, I suspect you are a developer, not just a user. A release per week is a sign that an app has poor quality.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > As a user you are asking for a measurably worse experience. Worse than what? A program with a million features is going to have a hundred known bugs at any point. Getting ten fixed every week is better than getting 100 fixed 3 months from now. That's the thing though: as a user (not as a developer, I assure you) I want the million features, and accept the thousand bugs in order to get them. But that also means I want the weekly patches. A desktop app with 1000 features and 1 bug is good quality. As is a desktop app with a million features and the same number of bugs-to-features. You might argue that one should count bugs in the absolute, but that's just moving goalposts. With that bar there simply are no complex high-quality apps! Any useful definition of complex high quality app must be relative. > I suspect you are a developer, not just a user Indeed (this is HN after all).
  - kasabali 4y ago
    > A program with a million features is going to have a hundred known bugs at any point. Getting ten fixed every week is better than getting 100 fixed 3 months from now Ideally. In real world though it's more like fix 10, introduce 5 more. So modern software is always in constant beta. I'd rather have them release every 3 months with proper QA process in place so it'd be fix 100, introduce 20 new or something.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  It seems wild for you to posit what users want as a sweeping generalization, have somebody say ~“that’s not what I want and here’s why”, and then just say full stop that their desires are wrong and don’t count anyway. Maybe your sweeping generalization is just wrong. Users, developers, and distro maintainers are not uniform groups with rigid pre-determined opinions and desires.
akerl_ 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I’m in the same boat as you. I have different thoughts in different use cases (for example, I have servers farms and other specific systems where I more strictly batch updates and value a slower cadence), but for my desktop, my mobile devices, and essentially all of my personal systems, I want constant rolling forward progress.
goodpoint 4y ago
> As a user I just want the app to be exactly like you describe ...and with zero security. No 3rd party reviewing it for vulnerable dependencies, homecalling and telemetries or worse, or breach of licenses. No guarantee of receiving security updates. Especially given that most upstream do not maintain stable release train and do not backport security fixes. And keep in mind that flatpak sandboxing is only partially effective and it also does not protect the data you put in the sandboxed app in any way. (Not to mention that more than 4 billion people on this planet have very slow, expensive and unreliable Internet access, and old devices with limited storage space.) No thanks, I'll stick with distributions.

NoGravitas 4y ago

Thanks for the voice of sanity, Drew.