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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Of course, for anyone who wants up-to-the-minute Unstable/Testing channel, Debian still has that as an option, but I'm with you on Debian Stable.

When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing. (When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages, in a way that now seems naive and reckless: "https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/#software".)

The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need, so I still get the APT experience. (I even got the closed Nvidia CUDA stack from Debian Stable `non-free` repos, the other day, and it just worked. Maybe a little too easily and well, but that's another matter.)

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> When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing.

I think a lot of people who came to Linux later don't fully realise how revolutionary apt was back then.

I can still remember the pain of manually downloading rpms only to find it needed another one installed first or wasn't version compatible with something else etc.

WINDOWS STILL CAN'T DO THAT

Winget with a huge "sort of ish".

They tried, I guess.

Not very hard.

I recently had to reinstall Win11. I don't use it, but I needed to keep it around.

Windows Update does not update packages from the Windows Store, or vice versa.

Aside from the dozens of external driver packages you need, and even using Ninite to get a basic set of working apps, you still need 2 totally separate tools to update Windows.

It says a lot about how bad Linux on the desktop still is today that some poor misled fools still think that Win11 plus WSL2 is a better Linux than Linux.

I've been on Windows 10 (because i use Linux as my main OS in recent years and only boot Windows once every few months), so i don't know the latest details.

Can Windows install the Visual C++ runtimes yet?

Third-party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolatey

Chocolatey is great but has its own pile of quirks.

It certainly can.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/

> The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need

At times it's missing something I want but usually Debian stable is all I need. I don't use unstable or backports: typically I either use Debian stable or I compile from source (like Emacs).

Last little hiccup recently is the lack of support for JPEG XL in the latest ImageMagick shipped with Debian stable (if I'm not mistaken), so I'd need to compile it from source (haven't done it yet but it's on my todo list: I want to recompile "losslessly" all my JPG to JPEG XL).

> When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages,

Oh I remember rpmfind.net (which still exists!)

This explains what freshmeat was; I hit it via google looking for an old scheme library, but the link's long dead.

nwv!

To this day, I still don’t quite get why so much of #linux was still using Red Hat at the time. Nat, miguel, the GNOME guys; the kernel guys; the storage guys.

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