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Comment by hwstar | Hacker News Reader

I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released Windows XP. I've been running Linux ever since.

Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years.

When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.

PPA's are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.

Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on the desktop.

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This depends entirely on the distribution you choose, not in any way on Linux.

As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub main branches.

You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date, and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.

Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared with tracking Debian stable.

Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with your own needs.

Unless, god forbid, you need the latest ImageMagick on Debian. Or heckloads of other software. I believe the commenter you replied to is much more correct than you. Application packaging / tracking up-to-date system and user packages is very far from a solved problem. On many Linuxes doing a system-wide upgrade is 90% of the time guarantee that part of your system will stop working. This has been mine, and many other people's, experience.

I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it, nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely close to what it will eventually look like in the future.

I think Arch does that fairly well by always having the most recent software available. Did you try it and see whether you liked that?

I'm using Arch and I really like it. However, it does take way more time and effort to install than the more mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, especially if you're like me and you're used to things like wifi "just working."

Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.

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