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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

good news for you is that linux is moving a bit more and more towards the portable application paradigm, with things like snap packages and AppImage. E.g. for texstudio I found that the version in my repos was outdated, so I just downloaded an AppImage file off their website and am using that now. Same for ultimaker cura. And you can use multiple versions in parallel.

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The problem with those approaches is that they bundle all the dependencies with the application, rather than using the system libraries. That means that if a security bug comes out, I need to (e.g. heartbleed), I need to track down every single application, check their version, cross my fingers that they at least used a shared library and didn't build against the static library, and update each one individually. For well-behaved software that uses the system libraries, I only need to update the system library and be done with it.

I get that snaps are easier for developers because managing versions can be painful. Pushing that pain onto the users isn't the solution.

Windows apps also bundle all dependencies, go check out any dotnet app(all crypto stuff is in some dotnet library..). Windows docs also encourage you to do this.

The difference is there is a set of base windows libraries that you can expect, so if you just use those with your win32 program then it's good. But most dotnet apps don't do this. It's just like using Appimage.

Snap and Flatpak are very much not portable (in the Portable Application sense). Snap relies on a repo and Flatpak heavily encourages one, although it does have a single-file bundle concept. Sadly both of them suffer from many of the other restrictions I mentioned.

AppImage is pretty great, I wish more projects used it.

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