Comment by subsection1h | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subsection1h | Hacker News Reader

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  > Pretty much every Desktop application where you want
  > newer versions is simply not available.

I'll never understand why this argument is made so frequently. The only explanation I can think of is that I use entirely different apps than most people do.

I use Debian Stable on my desktop computer, and I have the latest, or nearly the latest, versions of the apps that I use most. I use backports, third-party repos, and binaries that I download directly from upstream. For example, I get the following apps from the sources listed below:

Firefox - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

Google Chome - https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

Thunderbird - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/...

Emacs - http://emacs.naquadah.org/

LibreOffice - http://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/libreoffice-kde

VirtualBox - https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/

  > Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends
  > to be a constant pain.

Huh?

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

http://mozilla.debian.net/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

http://packages.debian.org/chromium

Things change all the time. Last time I searched (shortly after wheezy release when I first needed a newer Firefox and Iceweasel was not yet in backports) I couldn't find a current Firefox version build which worked on 64-bit Linux. So yeah - your link is one I haven't seen back then (not checking every week...) so I installed the nightly build instead which was recommended to me. Which worked for a while - until I think maybe 2 weeks ago when it first had some troubles on screen-updates, which got fixed one release later, but that fix-release broke flash (I stopped counting how often flash broke after an update by now, yeah, we all hate it, but still...). But thanks for the link, I will give that release you posted a shot next weekend - maybe I get a working browser back then for a while. Note - you can get stuff working again always in some way, but over the years I had to do that for a working browser over and over and over again every few months!

And well, I mentioned backports and binaries and compiling stuff yourself etc. But that has it's own share of troubles. Problems I had with backports for example had been package conflicts and missing source dependencies, which means hunting problems in there sometimes already fails in the "get shit compiling" stage. Then certainly not all apps are in there. A quick check for the apps I use often showed: Pidgin and xchat are in there (but both 1 version behind, which means several months...) while clang, Filezilla, MyPaint, Pencil and Audacity for example are not. A quick comparison on my Laptop showed that for all of those except Pencil (which seems outdated on both systems) newer versions are available at the moment in Ubuntu - in around half the time even the most current version. Also one gets a simple installer with the newest version for each of those (except clang) on Windows (just somewhat sad to see how it is often easier to run free software tools on Windows).

And this is still pretty much at start of this release cycle, experience tells me that it tends to get worse until the end.

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