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Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

> and who knows, that might just trigger some kind of revolution in Windows app management

Free trials of un-tar? Installing apps that require subscriptions to the cloud? Dev libraries that require enterprise support packages?

Good package management on Linux is owed largely to the tireless voices such as Stallman who understand the core issues here. Yes, tying together install scripts and maintaining repositories requires a lot of work, and good for Microsoft. But the reason It Just Works is because the software is free, from top to bottom, including the OS. And Mac will have the same problem here as Windows. For now, I'm guessing this is just a command-line interface to app stores.

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> Good package management on Linux is owed largely to the tireless voices such as Stallman

I thought it was due to the people designing the package managers. The people who run the repos Stallman-like end up shipping IceWeasel and Chromium and telling long boring stories to someone who just wanted Firefox and Chrome.

It was not the decision of debian to rebrand Firefox. Mozilla forced them to. Debian wanted to be able to ship security patches whenever they pleased, Mozilla required that they shipped Firefox stock, even if that meant waiting for Mozilla to approve security patches.

Chrome is not open source. Chrome tracks you. Chromium is open source and does not track you. Other than the slight branding differences, a user would not know the difference.

How are these slight changes an issue?

I think you missed the point.

... that wanting to deliver security fixes faster than upstream is bad?

I think YOU missed the point.

If Debian were subjected to the wishes of the authors of every piece of software they distribute, there would be no Debian.

> Chrome is not open source. Chrome tracks you. Chromium is open source and does not track you.

I'm pretty sure neither Chrome nor Chromium 'track you'. When you sign in to your Google account, then they keep track of your searches, to provide things like auto-complete, remember your book marks, and provide hints, location services, etc...

There's a huge difference between tracking you personally, and reading some information, keeping it in a database and providing you a better service later... (not going to lie, yesterday my boss sent me an email for a meeting, and GMail then automatically made a reminder for me and pushed it to my phone via Google Now - pretty damn awesome if you ask me).

The only differences I've seen between Chromium and Chrome is that Chromium lacks the Pepper plugin by default (which provides Flash), and the Hangouts binary blob. All the 'tracking' if you really want to call it that (I personally wouldn't), happens through Google services, not Chrome per se...

We owe a lot to those who work on package managers and the packages, but he has a point in that if it works so well it has a lot to do with the software being free.

Important things like good and efficient dependency management and library reuse are far easier to achieve when all the relevant sources are available to packagers.

IceWeasel and Chromium visually are Firefox and Chrome with different icons and you'll find them if you search their "real" names in the package manager. Not so hard, right? You can find about why they exist if you are interested, it's not required.

Not sure why you think I don't know why they exist, but Chromium is quite different from Chrome: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoo...

I know that you know it, I was talking about your hypothetical user.

Except for the color of the icon and the lack of support by default for AAC, H.264 and MP3 (I have support for those 3 in Chromium in Arch), do you find anything relevant that will make some non-expert notice they are using Chromium and not Chrome?

No I don't, the codec issues are enough.

I assume you haven't used Chromium. It's not an issue, as I said they don't come by default as in Chrome, but those codecs are easily installable through the package manager.

I hadn't even noticed Chromium doesn't have support by default for those codecs as I have used HTML5 audio and video without an issue. Really, for a non-expert Chromium is just Chrome with a blue icon.

Don't forget Flash and (until recently) PDF reading support.

Don't be so negative. Microsoft announced a partnership with Docker. And there is a lot of free software on Windows as well.

You don't get it.

Package management with Homebrew on OS X actually works quite well. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with.

Pretty much. While it's cool coming from Microsoft I'm willing to bet it's going to be an inferior implementation one way or another compared to Linux distributions.

Why? Powershell innovated a lot over bash - try and kill all processes started in the last hour with bash, then do the same with posh (hint: a regex is a terrible, terrible way to deal with time). MS could do something good with package management.

Try writing a Powershell cmdlet in a language not designed by Microsoft.

Any language that has a .net VM implementation can do it, including Python and Ruby, which weren't designed by Microsoft.

IronRuby is a dead project and IronPython was heavily written by Microsoft.

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