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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

It seems like all update/stores suffer from that. How can

    apt update; apt dist-upgrade

be so snappy and pleasant to use, whereas graphical frontends seem to hang, spin the fans, return little to no information about what is happening, and be terrible in general?

Windows 10 is particularly annoying since I don't even know how to force the update now because it seems to be dead set on doing it magically in the background at the least opportune moment.

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I think the advantage of apt and similar tools is their database is the source of truth for the system not the other way around. E.g. when Steam or even a general program installer run they are responsible for checking the current machine for anything that might conflict or a missing dependency and fixing that once detected then actually running the game or app. In apt it checks the lovingly crafted app database and if that's wrong or you've done something manual it's not set up to detect it'll simply break. When 99% of what you ever need is in this automatic database of free, basically first party, stuff it works wonders.

The only difference between Windows 10 and say Ubuntu with auto updates is Windows 10 will prevent you from picking an infinite time out for updates that require a reboot. If you want to manually update it's the same, go to the update app and check for updates. If there are updates hit install. Upon install the update app will have a restart to install button and the restart/shutdown buttons in the Start menu also have install and restart/shutdown options.

Steam, on Linux at least, comes with its own versions of libraries for games.

So it gets to act much like apt.

Windows Update is pretty brutal in general.

While Windows 7 was still current, there was an update that refused to install, and reported a cryptic error code in the UI.

After digging into dense log files and online support I came to discover it was refusing to install because of an Incompatible version of the super-old Novell Netware client, that lived in C:\Old_Computer\hard-drive\installers\novell_installer-${someversion}.exe

Windows was scanning the entire hard drive @ install time to look for any software on it's list of incompatible software.

Steam games and 95% of programs don't really have dependencies other than stuff like visual C++ runtimes, and steam takes care of running those installers. And those won't cause conflicts either. There's no good reason it can't work the same wonders.

> steam takes care of running those installers

In my experience it does this again, and again, and again... every single time I launch some games!

> graphical frontends seem to hang, spin the fans, return little to no information about what is happening, and be terrible in general?

That's a beautiful description of modern GUI development right there.

- What about a 150ms delay on-click for a smooth transition here?

- And that spinner looks too good to rush through, so make it pace evenly in case it finished too fast!

- Did you see that? There's a subtle but intuitive shade and color change depending on the result. So natural you hardly notice.

- Neat!

To be honest, while I may not appreciate this kind of design in every place all the time, I do wish I was skilled enough to make any beautiful GUI and web experiences at all.

Intricate design can be such a timesink doing even basic stuff if it's not one's strong area. Kudos to all the UI, UX people.

I see you have not run into the many edge cases where an apt-based package manager does something completely daft, requiring one to either go in and manually build back up state to get it sane, or say screw it, burn it to the ground, and start again. Anything with databases has had a high chance of getting one into this situation in my experience, and became the leading motivator for me to sit down, slog through Linux From Scratch, get familiar with the GNU dependency hierarchy, learn bloody dpkg, learn to tear apart packages, learn to build cross-compile toolchains (still haven't mastered quite yet), and work on setting out my own system conventions that I'll eventually write down and hand off to anyone unfortunate or enthusiastic enough to strike me as being a candidate for inheriting my systems. Also grokking the wiles of the dynamic linker.

You can say I'm doing it wrong for not going with the flow, but at the end of the day, in a world with ever increasing abstractive opaqueness, somebody has to carry forward a nuts n' bolts understanding of what all of this madness is built on.

Curious your thoughts on Nix/Guix for managing your packages?

Honestly, I like the idea. I've been meaning to pick up the GUIX package management layer to try out.

I love declarative reproducible systems in theory and figure they'll hit the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, though I'm not 100 percent sure they'll fix all my issues, as I tend to do horrifying things like making one system's dynamic linker aware of another system's set of libraries (crossing distro boundaries is ill advised, but doable after forcing yourself to read up on how ld works), and other daft things like that. Was distro hopping for a bit, and have settled on something I like, just need to unite all the other things into a single overarching system image.

Obviously, this would require me going one-man package maintainer for doing this, and I'm reluctant to start, because I see the value of these package management techniques everyone settled upon, and I'm just trying to figure out the right way to store everything.

Basically, I'm nuts, I do horrible things with linkers in the name of "screw it, I can't break it any worse" and I have an update turnaround time worse than Slackware.

I figure give it a couple years and the stubbornness will be broken through.

A typical game is tens of gigabytes. A typical apt package is megabytes.

It's broader than that. Fedora's package manager, dnf, is quick and snappy but it's GUI counterpart is sluggish and always hangs mid update.

Been using KDE native updater as much as command line. Couldn't spot any difference and it's as fast as cmd, never had any issues with it.

Nice. I've been thinking of switching to the KDE spin. My bad experience is with dnfdragora that comes with the default Gnome and XFCE spins.

That’s not really the point here. The UI on command line apt is instant, regardless of the package size you always know what apt is doing at the moment. Compare that to any recent updater that just throws vague status messages at you with no indication of whether anything is actually happening.

Is that true also when the package is 100 GB? Also last month I ran update on raspberry pi, and the kernel header package took an hour with no indication of progress except for heavy disk activity.

I’m still working trying to figure out why steam downloads seemed capped significantly slower than my general download speed

Make sure "Settings -> Downloads -> Limit Bandwidth To" is unchecked. If you checked something describing your internet speed after first install it'll throttle to that and I think the highest option in that menu was still 100 Mbps. Steam downloads default to bytes per seconds (option for bits in the same menu as above) so keep that in mind as well. In that menu you can make sure the download region is appropriately set to one near you too, I haven't had a problem with the autodetection for this personally though.

If all of the above is in place and it's still slow make sure you're not running into a single core throughput issue. The encryption and compression can be quite taxing. I can pretty easily hit 1 Gbps on a 5950X but some of my laptops can't due to their CPU.

Might be an issue on your end. Steam maxes out my bandwidth more than Speedtest/Fast.com do

As far as I can tell, Steam’s main window is a web browser, upon which their web app “Steam” provides the experience we all suffer today. No doubt it has benefits for cross-platform work minimization, but they don’t seem to care how shoddy an experience it provides.

Steam does use CEF but I don't think the UI rendering itself is actually what is causing slowness. The backend logic as well as services are native code

APT? Snappy? In my experience APT is rather slow.

apt has people that actually care about their users. They aren't shipping a MVP just to make big bucks.

Mmmm. I try not to ascribe malice or altruism to maintainers of software. All too often "works in my test lab" is the key motivator there.

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