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Comment by dingdingdang | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of just how bad regular Linux apt repo ecosystem is at backwards compatibility, you always have latest edition or nothing in most cases. Trying to get C64 emulator running at moment and only latest version of VICE is supported by Debian/Ubuntu repo .. issue with disk images for me. Literally no other version to try unless I self compile which accordingly let me down the usual garden path of impossible lib reqs. So. Yeah. Hope some sort of static compile reality or NixOS comes around to save us all at some point. Loathe the advertising show Windows have become but neither do I enjoy the history-less reality of current mainstream Linux dists :/

edit: forgot to add that I've been using C64 emulators since late 90s ... accomplishing this emulation feat was not a problem 20+ years ago!

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There's a really good reason for that, it would be almost impossible to handle all the dependencies, you would add an entire dimension (time) to the dependency tree and that is a lot of information to process for very limited returns. Most do maintain old release DVD/CD iso and that's about as good as you're going to get if some app you love makes major changes or is completely removed.

Have you tried installing an older version of Linux (since you're bringing up `apt`, older version of Debian)?

Those packages haven't changed. All of it will still run. Maybe you'll be able to just boot it in a VM inside your current OS and it'll just work.

Exactly - all versions of Fedora are still archived and available, all the way back to Fedora Cpre 1. And people do install thos from time to time, usually for curiosity or to commemorate an anniversary.

Heck, you might even still dig out Red Hat Linux ISOs from somewhere.

Red Hat still maintains mirroring for them:

http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/

They just don't have any ISO images for anything pre-6.2. Most of those can be found on sites like archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/redhat-5.2_release

"Loathe the advertising show Windows have become".

I just remove the game ad tiles from the start menu after a fresh install and never see any ads again anywhere in Windows 10.

It's not just a practical matter for many of us. We _know_ we can remove it. The problem is one of principal.

And just as a point of anecdote, I've had the ad tiles come back after updates sometimes. So it's something that rears it's ugly head even when I try to ignore it.

http://snapshot.debian.org/

> Linux apt repo ecosystem is at backwards compatibility

That's more an issue with the gnu/Linux userland progression than any package manager

There's problems with that too, but they're talking about the fact that (for example):

  $ apt-get install libfoo=0.1oldversion
  produces:
  E: Version '0.1oldversion' for 'libfoo' was not found

as soon as version 0.2newpieceofshit of libfoo exists, thus completely defeating the purpose of specifying a version.

Ubuntu dropped Qt4 from their repos, there is still plenty of third party software that uses that

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