Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

Having talked to many Windows users, I'm convinced that they never experienced the package and release management process of Linux distros before. If they did, they would constantly complain about Windows. With many Linux distros you can even update packages as part of the installation process, giving you a fully up to date distro. There's no reason for Microsoft to do anything less since they require serial keys, activation and network connections anyway.

Compare the time it takes to remove or install a component (application or library) and you will be very disappointed in Windows. No matter how fast your disk or cpu is, Windows finds a way to make you wait half a weekend. This is unacceptable, but nobody complains loud enough for Microsoft to reconsider.

Windows software management is a total mess and it got worse with newer Windows versions.

But other parts of Windows get better with each release and it's mostly the kernel land. This seems to be a case of different teams having different culture (Windows kernel, Windows shell, Windows installer, ...). Take Windows 2003's desktop, put it on Window's 10's kernel, and you have a nice system.

I'm not sure the comparison here is entirely fair.

On Linux systems, often most or all of the software being used is installed from the distro packages using the distro's package manager. Usually things go smoothly in this context.

On Windows systems, often most or all of the software being installed is installed using third party installers, which may have their own versions of various dependencies. The Windows infrastructure has to cope with this much less predictable context, and much of the time it does so reasonably effectively.

If you need to build third party software from source on Linux, or do more tricky things like cross-compiling to run on some embedded device, things are often far less pretty. Often you are just trusting that someone's makefile running under sudo won't dump junk all over your system, and that if it does, the uninstall target will tidy up properly -- which, in my experience, is not a safe bet on either count. Even building something from source in the first place on Linux typically depends on system-provided compilers and probably standard libraries, which as we saw with some relatively recent GCC changes can switch ABIs in non-backwards-compatible ways, potentially causing serious problems of their own.

In short, things look much better on Linux as long as you stay within the walled garden of your distro's own package management system. As soon as you need to go beyond that, you're probably in the Wild West.

Package management on Linux can be summed up as: use this old, custom patched version we provide or build from source.

The alternative is just Windows style software distribution: find a random exe on the internet and run it.

Some distros provide unpatched software that is up-to-date. :)

Perhaps I should have used those years ago instead of becoming jaded and cynical.

The trade off to having stable, secure packages has always been not getting new features.

For example, in LTS releases, major versions are frozen but perpetually updated and patched for the lifetime of the distro. In more bleeding edge rolling release distros, you receive (or compile) sometimes major version updates of software within a short time after their public release. In those distros you can still freeze your packages at certain versions, but it's not quite the same as making sure every library and component in the system is getting the same treatment.

Try manjaro (https://manjaro.github.io/). It uses pacman (like Arch) and yaourt (for AUR, building from source). Their driver and kernel management makes switching between free/non-free drivers or different kernels easy. And they're pretty close to bleeding edge; I've been running kernel 4.2 with Xorg 1.17 (released 2015/02) for months, and up to kernel 4.4rc4 and Xorg 1.18 are available in the repos.

I use Linux as my day-to-day work platform, but my GOSH I hate the patching hell to which popular distros (mainly Debian and RH-based ones) subject everybody.

For third-party software, it's a trade-off.

But when the distributor is also the author – like Microsoft is for everything that is delivered via Windows Update – that is no longer a concern. We can compare the solutions by technical merit alone… and Windows doesn't come off too well.

Kernel is getting better? It is disaster compared to Linux.

Care to elaborate?

Dont know the situation now, but this was posted some time back :

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74

No ext4 or other alternative file systems support, no file system snapshots, no file system write overlay, no alternative schedulers, no kernel upgrades without reboot...

Just regular things from Linux.

"No ext4" might be a feature.

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