Debian Needs a WinGet | Hacker News Reader

Debian Needs a WinGet

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3 pointsmadspindel12 comments

No it doesn't. It's just not a product that is designed for your requirements.

It's also not a product designed with my requirements either as I feel they take the piss with their "stable" ideology especially when a project doesn't follow the versioning scheme that Debian wants it to. But it doesn't make it wrong, it's just unsuitable for what you want.

Use Suse or Fedora if you want a simple yet up to date Linux. The rest of us who just want an up to date working system already did.

Debian has backports. Read the Debian docs first, then rant later.

> It should be up to the user to decide if to pin a program to an older version, not the Debian maintainers

IRL, stability matters. And no one wants to break things over a stable version.

Maybe for browsers it's OK, as you have a parallel ESR version, and for games/emulators. But for everything else it's a risk on companies.

> Debian has backports. Read the Debian docs first, then rant later.

I'm not ranting. I'm just telling how I would like the out-of-the-box experience to be. I don't want to read a lot of documentation on how to set it up to get the latest official stable version of each program. Maybe I want something like "backports-get install syncthing" but maybe not, since "Backports are packages taken from the next Debian release (called "testing")" - I want the latest official stable version.

> IRL, stability matters. And no one wants to break things over a stable version.

Then it should be up to the user to pin the package to an older version. I want the latest official stable version of e.g. syncthing. If I want an older version, I should be able to pin it that version instead.

>Then it should be up to the user to pin the package to an older version. I want the latest official stable version of e.g. syncthing. If I want an older version, I should be able to pin it that version instead.

Then Debian/Devuan/Gnuinos (FSF) is not for you. I used to pin the backports repo to have the highest priority, as it had the most updated browsers, libreoffice and the kernel while keeping the rest stable. It worked really well.

>I don't want to read a lot of documentation on how to set it up to get the latest official stable version of each program.

Debian has an administration handbook which can be installed offline, you don't have to do for each program. Just read the section on backports, set the priorities right under Synaptic (the easiest way to do that) and rull a full upgrade.

"When I install syncthing, I want the latest official stable version. This is what Windows gets right with WinGet. With WinGet, I'm installing syncthing from the official source. With APT, I'm installing a syncthing version maintained by a group of people that calls themself the Debian Go Packaging Team. And this version is a year older than the official stable version!"

I do not like binary packages. I prefer to compile the source myself. If the program is too difficult to compile then I am less inclined to use it. Needless to say I am not a Windows user.

This. I run stable versions of everything, but for libre games I just compile the latest version over Git/SVN to get new features or campaigns. As games are not an essential tool, I can break things from time to time.

My first Linux was SuSe 9.2. I had not touched any SuSe product until I tried Tumbleweed recently and was surprised how good it actually is, easily one of the best installers if you want some flexibility but don't want to spend too much time customizing, it just did what I wanted with a few simple clicks. Plus the package manager zypper is amazingly fast!

Shipping old but stable versions of packages with security fixes backported is the motto of Debian Stable. If you don't like it, you will not be happy with it.

If you want to stick to Debian, you could try switching to Debian Testing and have newer packages (although the mention "syncthing" is not at the latest stable version there either).

Yes, and I like the idea of "Shipping old but stable versions of packages with security fixes backported is the motto of Debian Stable". This is how it works with Windows too. Windows 11 is using LibreSSL 3.4.3 and the latest stable release is 3.9.2 according to the LibreSSL website.

I want the OS to be stable, but the installed user programs to be the latest stable version. So SSH can stay on an older stable version, but user programs like syncthing, firefox, docker etc. should be latest stable version.

That' s what the backports' repo does. Also, you have two Firefoxen, ESR in usual repos, and the mainline one.

Why is this flagged?

I don't agree with the problem or the solution, but flagging it just seems emotion-driven.

Thats what flatpak is for. And unfortunatly why ubuntu pushes for snap.

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