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Comment by kurtisc | Hacker News Reader

The author praises the package manager as a positive, not a negative as I usually see from people used to downloading *.exe installers. He's used other distros, plus a Mac, in the past, but I wonder if phone app stores (plus Windows' own software store) have made this become a more natural method of installing software for the average user?

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I've been using Linux for nearly two decades and the package manager is probably one of the most attractive features it has over other operating systems.

Keeping your software up-to-date on Windows is a massive pain and requires tons of manual work.

I guess people are more used to the package manager's way of working today due their exposure to app stores; but I'd be surprised if anyone wasn't impressed by how easy and convenient a package manager is after using them for a small amount of time.

> package manager is probably one of the most attractive features it has over other operating systems.

I agree with this and I'm using Linux only for several months, the update experience + software discovery is really something mindblowing (nope, Chocolatey and brew are not really comparable).

I still don't like the model completely (additional work for package managers that sometimes screw things up, see e.g. Debian Weak Keys) but overall this is a very pleasant experience.

I switched from Windows to Linux before I had a smartphone and appreciate the package manager. I got a Macbook for work and lamented the lack of package manager (homebrew is a weak substitute in several ways).

Macs have the App Store, which works well for GUI programs. On the CLI side I have played with Brew (and Fink a long time ago), but I prefer MacPorts because it feels more solid (at the expense of not having all of the bleeding edge stuff.

Ah, yes, but my package manager covers every piece of software I use. No specialized update services. It seems like a small thing, but it's more pleasant.

Oh yes! We solved that problem in the early 2000's.

And if it doesn't cover software you use, then it sucks to be you. Or if you want to install an application to a different disk. Or if you want to have two different versions of an application installed. Or if you want to use an application that relies on dependencies your package manager has decided are incompatible. The package management paradigm has its own set of limitations and flaws.

I've really not had any issues finding what I need for Arch Linux.

If you want to install to a different disk, you could still install the raw binary, or mount a directory in your applications directory.

Those are just hard situations in general. I'm a big advocate of statically linking anything possible, because I have disk space galore and dependencies can be a pain as for your last point.

They aren't hard problems at all. Even DOS handled them with ease. The problem is that the culture of application development around systems with package managers doesn't consider these use cases at all, forcing you to jump through a bunch of hacky hoops to do deal with them. Case in point: symlinking or mount-based tricks because developers hardcode paths.

Having multiple versions of dependency libraries was a pain on DOS, Windows, ... It just is what it is. For the record, you can have multiple versions on any OS, but it's important they have a version in their name and that the dependent application is aware of that convention.

The specifics of path layout is just how Unix-like systems do things in general. It's not all that different on MacOS.

If you really like the filesystem layout of Windows, just use Windows. If you really like `exe` files, just use Windows. I don't see the problem.

> Having multiple versions of dependency libraries was a pain on DOS

DOS didn't even have the concept of a dependency being separate from the application, so i'm not sure what you're trying to say. MacOS classic also didn't. Windows didn't either, really, until DLLs became a fad and ushered in the era of DLL hell.

> If you really like the filesystem layout of Windows, just use Windows. If you really like `exe` files, just use Windows. I don't see the problem.

I don't particularly like the way Windows works these days because it is becoming more like UNIX, and installers certainly aren't a great idea but I still prefer them to package managers.

There's no problem, I'm Just expressing an opinion about package management, same as you. If the Linux community doesn't agree, and they've made it quite clear that they don't, then that's fine and I'll just continue not to use their OS like most people.

Those are all problems with implementations, not the paradigm.

Show me an implementation that doesn't have these problems, because I've yet to see one. That's not surprising though, since once you've solved these problems you don't need a package manager.

For a long time you did not need a package manager or installers or anything like that on Macs. Just drag the application to your Applications folder and it was installed. I was always skeptical of Mac software that came with an ‘installer’. Like, what on earth is so complicated that the developer thought he needed a separate executable merely to copy the application over??

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