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Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

> Will someday debian authors and die hard fans understand that old libc and old Firefox or Gimp are different and one really can mean stable and another can be just outdated?

1. Things depend on one another. Keeping the base system stable while iterating everything else more quickly can end up being infeasible because it's turtles all the way down. Application X wants a newer CMake to build, which wants a newer something else, which wants yet another newer version of something, and then your base system changes underneath you.

2. I really, really love to “fire and forget” a Debian installation for a few years. I've got elderly family members on Linux that are really sensitive to changes in the UI. Things being not changing for years rather than months or weeks is a blessing.

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1. Mac OS somehow achieved exactly this. 2. Actually no-changes and no-brainers are bad for mental health of elderly. In that age brain needs training.

Tell that to my Dad when he can't access his email because they tweaked the UI yet again.

Yeah retirement home staff is going to switch my shell every week so I stay alert!

If the only thing keeping me cognitively engaged in old age will be UI changes, I might as well die.

> 1. Mac OS somehow achieved exactly this.

You're right - that's why macos definitely hasn't spawned suspiciously debian-like package managers in an attempt to handle all these problems.

And if we're talking about "app bundles", if you dig a bit deeper you'll find most of these applications which "just work" just bundle all of their dependency libs. God knows if they bother to update them or do a security release if vulnerabilities are found in their bundled libs!

> bundle all of their dependency libs

Mother of God! Very popular argument. No one cares (in terms of architecture).

> vulnerabilities are found in their bundled libs!

Yes, god only knows how entire install base of mac and windows machines works today (this problem is not as big as you try to present here).

Your arguments like debate about linux monolithic and minix micro kernel architecture. Minix is more advanced in theory, linux (not linux desktop) working in reality.

> god only knows how entire install base of mac and windows machines works today

The issue being that, for a lot of people, they often work a little too well.

If you're going to follow the philosophy that caring about the correctness, lack of duplication and security of an installed application is too esoteric to be relevant, I'll remind you that you're entirely free to do that to any extent you like with linux. Equally people like me are free to tell people who do that that they will receive no support from me for such a setup.

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