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Debian's policies also led to a heavily restricted version of RetroArch being available instead of the real version. Specifically, RetroArch has its own packag
by Dwedit 3y ago
Debian's policies also led to a heavily restricted version of RetroArch being available instead of the real version. Specifically, RetroArch has its own package management functionality built-in through its "Core Updater" feature, which downloads and installs emulators in the form of library files. This is banned by Debian because it sidesteps the whole package manager system.
Meanwhile, you can still build the full version of RetroArch from source code by installing the dependencies of Debian's source package, but building the original source code instead.
- cogman10 3y agoDebian is somewhat of a bad fit for a media center PC. I've learned that the hard way trying to get Kodi and retro arch working. It's otherwise a great os.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoRetroArch provides a Flatpak, making this mostly a non-issue.
- Barrin92 3y agono, from a distribution standpoint it's a pretty grave issue. As the name suggests distributions distribute, and if we start to unbundle the OS from the application layer, Debian loses the very thing people chose it for. It's in a sense like a legacy carmaker or newsroom being more concerned with its own control than with the product. Doesn't end well over the long term.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago> Debian loses the very thing people chose it for I don't buy this. People don't choose Debian for the third party software in the repo. If they did, it's a bad choice. People choose Debian as a rock solid and stable base OS, and it's perfectly rational to use it as a base for third party software on top from other sources.
- Barrin92 3y ago>If they did, it's a bad choice. It's an excellent choice. Debian provides about 60k software packages compared to say 15k in the Fedora repos. Debian and derivatives vastly outnumber other distributions in terms of available software, it's what drove Ubuntu's popularity, everything's available on it. You can use it as a stable base OS, but it doesn't have any particular advantage, and even some disadvantages compared to RedHat or Suse distributions which offer you many more enterprise tools like Yast out of the box, package managers that are able to do atomic and reversible transactions, which apt still does not do, and so on.
- gettodachoppa 3y agoI don't think I want Debian changing their packaging policies so some random Retroarch contributor can break my app (or worse, losing my data) by pushing a bad update. I want Debian to be a rock-solid OS where nothing breaks even if it means old software versions, because adults are doing QC. If I need a specific app to always be up to date, I can get it from external sources on a case-by-case basis, such as downloading an AppImage/Flatpack from the developer's website or using Docker. Why wouldn't you want a rolling distro if you want everything updated all the time?
- csande17 3y agoWeird that that was considered an issue while KDE Discover and snapd will both happily install stuff from third-party "stores" by default on Debian.