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Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the freedom of "hacking" your system one of the main reasons for using Linux to begin with?

I'm not sure it's a main reason, but it is indeed a key property of having full control over your own system that you are welcome to do this. But this level of control also comes with a curse: if you break your system, then you get to keep the pieces. I find it quite upsetting to be blamed instead.

You are misassessing how people use Desktop/Laptop computers. Ie you're assuming people will install Ubuntu, and leave it in its default state, or only use package managers.

I understand how people use their computers. I merely object to those people then blaming the distro for not writing software that can magically work around how they hacked it up.

Yeah, it's not the Distro's fault that they didn't design it for how people actually use their computers. How could they have guessed that would be an issue?

I don't understand how you can expect a distro developer to account for every single possible third party repository and package that is out there. That's multiple orders of magnitude more packages that they would have to support and test for, it's simply not feasible. It's reaching into combinatorial explosion. I would actually have serious concerns if a Linux vendor was somehow promising that they could support such an unrealistic thing.

The real solution was mentioned up thread though: they are designing it to be used that way, but you have to use snaps or flatpaks. Not third party apt repositories which can overwrite system components in an infinite number of ways.

Do programs installed via installer executables/scripts also contribute to this problem?

If you install them to your home directory, no. If they install to system directories (/usr, /lib, /etc, /var) then they could cause issues. I personally would not run any installer script that asks to use sudo or otherwise give it root permissions, that's a recipe for disaster. If you have to do that, run it in a container.

Regrettably, that's most software! When I start a new OS (Windows or Linux), I have a set of software I want to install. Examples: Firefox, Chrome, VsCode, PyCharm, SOlidWorks, KiCad, Em-Client, CubeIDE, Rust, Python (NOT the old system version), Steam etc. Almost all of them operate outside the package manager with their own installers!

I'm not sure what you mean, that isn't even most software out of the examples you gave. I think snap and flatpak have almost all of those. For Rust and Python I think you can use rustup and pyenv. All of that would be preferable to using a root installer.

If the only option they have is an installer that runs as root, then the safest way to handle that would be to run it inside a docker container. Those companies should probably not be shipping installers on Linux unless they target very specific distributions and are working closely with them to ensure they don't break the upgrade process, otherwise it's going to cause issues.

Edit: here are the snaps and flatpaks and docker images I could find.

https://snapcraft.io/firefox

https://snapcraft.io/chromium

https://snapcraft.io/code

https://snapcraft.io/pycharm-professional

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.chromium.Chromium

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.jetbrains.PyCharm-Profe...

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kicad.KiCad

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam

https://github.com/xanderhendriks/docker-stm32cubeide

AFAIK, Solidworks and eM Client are not available on Linux, but if they were you would probably see them available in one of those forms.

None of those you linked are recommended on the official websites:

https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install: Curl an .sh

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/about/: Download and install a .deb

Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-r... - Download a .tar.bz2

VsCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/download - Download a DEB

Pycharm https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/download-thanks.h... - download a .tar.gz2

Python - Install from source or use a 3rd party dep.

https://www.kicad.org/download/ubuntu/ - KiCad is the only exception that wants you to use an official package.\

Docker is a pain to use; it's a crutch used by web devs and Dev-ops for complex business stuff.

Right, and the ones that require root to install are steam, vscode and kicad. Kicad is probably in the worst situation because it uses a PPA. Please double check your links before posting, it will save us both time. It's also not really relevant what the official website says, as it's traditional in open source for the packaging to be handled by the distribution, not by the upstream.

You're free to "hack" it as much as you wish, but when you break it(if you don't know what you're doing) you get to keep all the pieces. And the blame.

I guess it depends what you consider as "hacking", exactly. To me "hacking" implies "customizing, but not as the makers had intended".

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