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Comment by cornercasechase | Hacker News Reader

The “year of the desktop” implies a solution for consumers, not professionals. That being said for almost every other kind of development Linux is by far the best platform. I cannot develop on Mac anymore due to Apple making things more difficult in every update.

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Package managers are useless for getting the latest maven, gradle, or ant version. This in combination with there being multiple poorly-documented ways to set environment variables and there being no GUI for any of them means that setting up for Java development is massively worse than Windows the instant you step outside of your IDE.

> Package managers are useless for getting the latest maven, gradle, or ant version.

My package manager has the latest versions of maven and gradle. Ant is behind; upstream is up to 1.10.13 but my package manager only has 1.10.9.

did you have to enter some magic string like ppa:chien that literally no one would ever know

No. They're not in an overlay. They're in the primary, central repo.

maven 3.9.4: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/maven-bin

gradle 8.2.1: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/gradle-bin

ant 1.10.9 (upstream is 1.10.13): https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/ant

Oddly there's no overlay that has a more up to date version of ant. So even if I did want to enter magic strings, that wouldn't have helped.

lol gentoo. that's not available in debian, bruh

I'd say they use a rolling release distro like Arch or similar, where packages are updated very often. In fact, I believe Arch even has a tool to seamlessly manage multiple Java installations.

Maybe in 2054 Debian will figure out how to update packages.

I’m sure the versions in AUR are up to date.

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