Hacker News Reader

Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

But there is such a thing as the paradox of choices. This is a big problem on Linux because if you want to do a software, you first have to handle this diversity for UI, bus communication, configuration storage, dir layouts, init systems, packaging... It's a nightmare. Compare to releasing the same thing for windows or mac.

Starting Mir after and if investing on Wayland failed would have been much wiser.

View on HN

Windows packaging isn't all it's cracked up to be. There is no standard package repository, the norm is just to distribute executables of various kinds, the process of building installers is not that simple...

"Starting deb after and if investing on rpm failed would have been much wiser" except that Debian developers already knew rpm didn't meet their needs.

But these arguments are always selectively applied to certain parties (e.g. Canonical) and not others (e.g. Red Hat).

Try to create an executable that works for windows 7, 8 and 10. Now try to do the same for centos, ubuntu and gentoo. Or 3 LTS of Ubuntu.

Besides, deb/rpm is the perfect example of our failure as a community. To the end user, having both standards bring nothing. Neither are better than the other for 99% of use cases, and we ends up needing twice the tool, documentation and community effort that we should.

And because it's such pain, any languages created their own package managers. gem, pip, goget, npm...

Now we are replaying the same with flatpak/snap.

> Windows packaging isn't all it's cracked up to be. There is no standard package repository, the norm is just to distribute executables of various kinds, the process of building installers is not that simple...

After dealing with the various walled gardens and their concomitant limitations, and after dealing with any system of linux package management, the Windows way feels like some sort of joyous escape from captivity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com