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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

You clearly have never used Linux in any form. There are multiple package managers, granted.

However, one strength they all share is: "you usually don't get .exe or .dmg"! Absolutely! Apps are integrated and not simply add-ons as they are in Windows or Apple land. When I want to install say libreoffice or wireshark I simply ask the system to install them. I absolutely do not browse the internet and download something, extract it and run some "installer". When I update my system, all apps and the OS are updated in one go.

My system is curated for me, end to end, to a greater or lesser extent. When I update, all my system is updated - OS, apps and all.

I don't think yours is (whatever it is).

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> You clearly have never used Linux in any form.

Can you please edit out personal swipes from your comments here? This one would be fine without that first sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you need the last version of Wireshark, it’s getting complicated. And when you have a setup with Wireshark that works why update it? I am dubious that Wireshark can be an attack vector so security updates won’t be useful. Installing last versions is very straight forward when you are on Osx or Windows. You just go to the website and download it. Plus you get the original binaries not a doctored version to fit whatever launcher and log organization is currenty trending at Ubuntu HQ. Don’t get me wrong I still love my Ubuntus. But this we need to rewrite all software to fit our distributions is not a strenght. I think this line of thinking is kind of shared by Linus himself.

Going to dozens or even hundreds of different websites to download the latest versions of software and then manually installing them all isn’t fast at all.

c.f. apt-get upgrade or similar, which takes a few seconds.

>c.f. apt-get upgrade or similar, which takes a few seconds.

Except when the package isn't included, or it isn't the version you needed, because then you have to spend 40 minutes trying to install all the dependencies and building the package from source, instead of the 3 minutes it would have taken to install an .exe on Windows.

> because then you have to spend 40 minutes trying to install all the dependencies and building the package from source, instead of the 3 minutes it would have taken to install an .exe on Windows.

No, you take 2 minutes to install it using flatpak, or download a .appimage file.

And if neither of those are available, you spend that 40 minutes packaging the software, and submitting it to the distro you use for inclusion.

(If it was already packaged, but not new enough, that's a ~5 min job to do the update for your distro)

> And when you have a setup with Wireshark that works why update it? I am dubious that Wireshark can be an attack vector so security updates won’t be useful.

Ignoring feature enhancements and bug fixes for a moment, do you really think it improbable that there are security issues in a piece of software whose entire job is to sit on the network and record everything that it sees and then translate and interpret it?

If an evil app is already communicating on the web and is already on your computer, what can it gain more?

Wireshark (usually) runs in promiscuous mode; it'd be "an evil app is already able to send something visible from your network interface" - which to be fair, might help for internal uses. It does usually mean that anything on your local network can attack you.

Because the "evil app" is just a specially crafted JPG that your browser opened up that triggers some edge case in the old unpatched version of Wireshark that is inspecting traffic.

You have a very limited imagination. Wireshark is regularly attacked -- it parses random data it gets off the network, therefore it can be attacked using deliberately malformed packets. See https://www.wireshark.org/security/ for more info.

Every single of these vulnerabilities are crashes and infinite loops. The worst thing you can do - if I am running a 5-year old Wireshark - is to make it crash if I am visiting one of your web services. And you probably can already do that in newer versions if you dig enough.

> When I update, all my system is updated - OS, apps and all.

Except for when the distro "gods" don't bother updating a package for years, so you always get the "stable" 5-year old version.

Please give me an example. The Linux kernel is about a week old on this laptop. The current version of Windows server is called 2019, the last one was 2016 (rofl)

Most websites also have rpm's and Deb packages.

And when the distro decides you have to give up some software because of a conflict it can't handle.

But you have to live under the wing of your distro mantainers, instead of installing whatever you want from any third party. Isn't Linux supposed to be about freedom?

Yes, you can install software using tarballs, but it's not usable for 90% of users, and not because of the distribution model, but because of the lack of standardization in a good, easy to use application-installing API.

I get the base OS along with a very long list of apps with any distro. For example Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse etc - all will curate a lot of apps for me. If I want to go off piste I download the code and crack on. I have several compilers to choose from LLVM, gcc int al out of the box.

tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations. You have to find the bloody things, download them each time and hope you have found the right one and not a trojaned one. Each one needs its own update routine and will not be updated when the rest of the system is updated.

The Windows and Apple software distribution model is archaic compared to all Linux/BSD etc distros.

>tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations.

Except that they're hard to install for a novice user.

>You have to find the bloody things, download them each time and hope you have found the right one and not a trojaned one. Each one needs its own update routine and will not be updated when the rest of the system is updated.

None of those are problems for me, the actual problems are: installing all the dependencies and then executing the make commands. Both of those could be solved with a well designed API.

>The Windows and Apple software distribution model is archaic compared to all Linux/BSD etc distros.

The Windows and apple software distribution works for all my use cases, the Linux model doesn't (eg: if I want many versions of the same package, if I want a package that isn't included in the repos, etc).

Also, from a philosophical and aesthetical point of view, the Windows & Mac distribution model is better: you get your OS from the OS developer, and you get your specific-use applications from the developer of said application. You are not dependent on a single entity that supposedly knows what you need better than you.

> You are not dependent on a single entity that supposedly knows what you need better than you.

This right here is what Linux Desktop doesn't seem to understand. The whole culture is ingrained with the attitude that they do, in fact, know what you need better than you.

> But you have to live under the wing of your distro mantainers, instead of installing whatever you want from any third party. Isn't Linux supposed to be about freedom?

You don't. Yes, but if you don't take advantage of the freedom, that's not freedom's fault.

> Yes, you can install software using tarballs, but it's not usable for 90% of users, and not because of the distribution model, but because of the lack of standardization in a good, easy to use application-installing API.

See Flatpak. Go look at what software is available at https://flathub.org/apps , but both GNOME and KDE have application managers that can install from Flatpak repos (configured to use Flathub by default), and possibly the distro's native package manager as well (via PackageKit).

Or you can also use AppImage files.

"you usually don't get .exe or .dmg"! Absolutely! Apps are integrated and not simply add-ons as they are in Windows or Apple land. When I want to install say libreoffice or wireshark I simply ask the system to install them. I absolutely do not browse the internet and download something, extract it and run some "installer". When I update my system, all apps and the OS are updated in one go."

I think a lot of this is learned, or conditioned behavior ... there are a great many UNIX packages that could very easily (and very nicely and conveniently) exist as static linked, single file executables.

This is how a lot of software distribution worked in the 90s - for say, some Solaris tool or whatever. Granted, the distribution mechanism (some .edu FTP site somewhere) was totally insecure, but the packaging mechanism was great.

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