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Comment by purerandomness | Hacker News Reader

You are in the target group for Arch Linux. Highly recommended.

Not if you want to run more versions side by side including betas, if you are a professional you don;t update your tools mid-project and pray it will be fine.

That's what Nix(OS) is for :)

Great, so I'll just go ahead and learn a new language just to install software, that's totally reasonable.

You don't really need to do that though. You can also use nix-env to install software.

Self contained apps like app images and .tar.gz also work most of the time.

While Nix is great - don't forget the venerable portage :-)

I don't see how. Arch still heavily relies on a repo and volunteer package maintainers.

Arch's Krita was updated to 4.4.0-4 at 2020-10-13 18:23 UTC, approximately 18 hours and 52 minutes ago.

While I can't see when the original blog post was submitted, I know this forum post was posted 2 hours ago. Are you sure you would benefit from updating even faster?

EDIT: In any case, you could use the AUR package that points directly to the git repo.

Would the AUR let me have the current Krita and the old one installed simultaneously? My experience with repo/package models suggests it very much would not.

> Would the AUR let me have the current Krita and the old one installed simultaneously?

I doubt it.

> My experience with repo/package models suggests it very much would not.

The Nix package manager would. However, I have no idea if their packages are kept up-to-date like that.

I don't think so. It should be possible to install the older version in different prefix (e.g. `./configure --prefix=/opt`) but I don't think AUR supports multiple slots (like portage does) out of the box.

My cursory search on the interweb did not yield any promising results on the Arch wiki either. Happy to be corrected, of course.

If you comment out that your aur build provides and conflicts with krita and install it under /usr/local or some such you can do parallel installs.

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