Comment by roda73 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roda73 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons I absolutely hate Linux based development and operating systems built with it.

We all know it now as dependency hell, but what it is in fact is just a lazy shortcut for the current development that will bite you down the path. The corporate software is not a problem, because the corporate users don't care as long as it works now, in the future they will still rely on paid solutions that will continue working for them. For me, I run a local mirror of arch linux, because I don't want to connect to internet all the time to download a library that I might need or some software that I may require. I like it all here, but since I haven't updated in a while I might see some destructive update if I were to choose to update now. This should never happen, another thing that should never happen is if I were to compile an old version of some software. Time and time again, I will find a useful piece of software on github and I will naturally try compiling it, it's never easy, I will have to hunt the dependency it requires, then try compiling old versions of various libraries. It's just stupid, I wish it were easier and built smarter. Yes sometimes I want to run old software, that has no reason not to work. When you look at windows, it all works magically, well it's not magic it's just done smart. On GNU+Linux smart thinking like this is not welcome, it never has been. Instead they rely on huge amounts of people that develop this software, to perpetually update their programs for no reason, but to satisfy a meaningless number of a dependency.

It’s all volunteer work, not some corporation with trillions laying around. If you want something easy, use Debian (or ubuntu). They pretty much have everything under the sun.

What you want to have (download software from the net and run it) is what most distro have been trying to avoid. Instead, they vet your code, build it, and add it to a reputable repo. Because no one wants to download postgres from some random sites.

Last time I checked, Ubuntu/Canonical is a multimillion dollar company, Red Hat is a multibillion dollar company, SuSE sold for $2.5B, and The Linux Foundation has over $250M in revenue to spend only 3% on development of Linux specifically.

Enough of the BS of "we're just volunteers" - it's fundamentally broken and the powers that be don't care. If multiple multibillion dollar entities who already contribute don't see the Linux desktop as having a future, if Linus Torvalds himself doesn't care enough to push the Foundation on it; honestly, you probably shouldn't care either. From their perspective, it's a toy, that's only maintained, to make it easier to develop the good stuff.

Those companies sell server OS support, not consumer desktop. And Linux is rock solid for that purpose.

Desktop Linux is OK. And I think it’s all volunteer work.

OK at best. Barely functional. Incredibly unstable.

Get over yourself. Linus himself said Linux is just a hobby. It just happened to be the best because of the lack of red tape dragging development down. It got as big as it did BECAUSE it was a volunteer project with the right choice of license and remains the best DESPITE big corps pouring money all around it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mmmlh3/linux_has_a_i...

Ubuntu is not perpetually stable. I mean.. I have some old instances running since 2018 or so and they continue to work fine, but I've been blocked from running/updating certain apps. So my choices now are upgrade the OS and risk breaking everything (almost certain) or... Just keep using the old stuff.

Use nixos. I install updates maybe every few months and it's fine. My desktop experience has been completely solid for almost a decade.

My work computer with Windows on the other hand requires restarts every day or two after WSL inevitably gets into a state where vscode can't connect to it for some reason (when it gets into such a state it also usually pegs the CPU at 100% so even unlocking takes a minute or more, and usually I just do a hard power off).

I sympathize with what you're saying. In theory Docker and Snaps and such are supposed to more explicitly package Linux programs along with their dependencies. Though Docker especially depends heavily on being networked and servers being up.

I'm not a fan of bundling everything under the sun personally. But it could work if people had more discipline of adding a minimal number of dependencies that would be themselves lightweight. OR be big, common and maintain backwards compatibility so they can be deduplicated. So sort of the opposite of the culture of putting everything through HTTP APIs, deprecating stuff left and right every month, Electron (which puts the browser complexity into anything), and pulling whole trees of dependencies in dynamic languages.

This is probably one of the biggest pitfalls of Linux, saying this as someone to whom it's the sanest available OS despite this. But the root of the problem is wider, it's just the fact that we tend to dump the reduction of development costs onto all users in more resources usage. Unless some big corp cares to make stuff more economical, or the project is right for some mad hobbyist. As someone else said, corps don't really care about Linux desktop.

Whilst this dose applies to all distro's to some extent; it is Arch's main distinguishing feature, it is a 'rolling release' with all parts being constantly updated. RHEL for instance gives you a 13-year cycle where you will definitely not get a destructive update.

> We all know it now as dependency hell

Too young to remember Windows 3.1 and “DLL hell?” That was worse.

C/C++ dependency management is easy on windows? Seriously? What software did you build from source there?

Once it's compiled, it keeps running. I can still run win32 programs and what not. Is that true of Linux programs? Can I run one compilation on any distro for years to come? I honestly don't know.

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