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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> I have trouble updating packages (that aren't install via pip/npm/cargo) on Linux all the time as a newbie. The experience is worse than Windows for some reason

If you haven't installed them via your programming language's package manager, you either installed them manually or via the OS package manager. The first one you'd know how to upgrade, and for the second you can ask it what version it is and what version is available to upgrade to (for compatibility reasons it might not be the latest, or latest major, unless you use the software vendor's own package manager repositories).

It's actually much easier than in Windows, because you have a piece of software (package manager) that is your one stop shop to knowing what is installed, update it, check versions available, etc. unless you've manually installed stuff.

In Windows you... google and download random .exes? Cool. As good as the worst possible option on Linux.

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> In Windows you… google and download random .exes?

Windows has an official package manager now too.

And there's Microsoft provided and supported software in it?

Yes.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...

Not exactly random. It's not hard to tell which website is official 7-zip website. Also choco and scoop exist on Windows.

> As good as the worst possible option on Linux.

I understand this is not a fair comparison, but in practice, they're not as easy. When using Windows, I usually use it with a proper GUI interface, so popping up a browser and download the newest installer for a software from their official website would take me less than 1 min.

Doing similar for my Linux VPS with only a terminal is much more complicated.

> Doing similar for my Linux VPS with only a terminal is much more complicated.

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

I'm replying to the "the worst possible option on Linux", i.e. when the said software is not available in package manager. 7-zip is just a (bad) example; since you can install 7-zip using `choco install 7zip.install` on Windows too.

I meant to say when you can't find the software you want in package manager, it's easier to download it manually and install it on Windows than (again, unfair comparison) a terminal-only Linux server.

> I meant to say when you can't find the software you want in package manager, it's easier to download it manually and install it on Windows than (again, unfair comparison) a terminal-only Linux server.

In that case you would just copy the download link and paste it into your terminal session. It's rarely needed though as most software is available through your distribution's software repositories.

> Doing similar for my Linux VPS with only a terminal is much more complicated.

Debian/Ubuntu:

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt upgrade

Fedora/RHEL:

  sudo dnf update

Arch:

  sudo pacman -Syu

Alpine Linux:

  apk update
  apk add --upgrade apk-tools
  apk upgrade --available

Of course, if the package you need isn't available in the standard repos, then you'll need to look elsewhere (e.g. PPAs or third party repos). There's also options like Flatpak and AppImage if you want something that's a bit closer to how you'd choose to install new releases on Windows.

If I wanted to update all of the installed software I have on my Windows install, there'd basically be no way for me to do this, outside of shady update manager software.

At the same time, I get the appeal of being able to just download a new release and install it, both AppImage on Linux and the way you install software on macOS (just drag the file into Applications) seem similarly pleasant to me in that regard.

To expand on the latter (the response got deleted), you can very much do something like https://peazip.github.io/peazip-linux.html (I wish 7-Zip was available on Linux natively, but as far as GUI software goes, PeaZip is pretty nice) however that's not the most common approach. You should generally prefer using the package manager when you can.

Sorry I wasn't very clear, it's totally on me.

On average, the experience of upgrading/managing packages is obviously much better than Windows.

I meant to say in certain cases (like the `unzip` example I mentioned above), when the system's build-in package manager fails, I seem to not be able to find alternatives like what I did on Windows (just find the piece of binary I want and manually install it). I to this day still can't find a way to update `unzip` to a version that supports AES on my Debian VPS.

> I to this day still can't find a way to update `unzip` to a version that supports AES on my Debian VPS.

Maybe because there is none? I quickly googled and found this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unzip/+bug/220654

For archives encrypted with aes-256 p7unzip-full can be used.

This is not a Linux only issue though, the native Windows unzip tool also doesn't seem to support aes-256 (yet): https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60674080/how-to-open-win...

The author in this answer clearly has a version of unzip that can detect "AES_WG". Unfortunately they only vaguely said (in one of the comment) "Since then the main Linux distros have added patches to fix various issues" and didn't specify which distro.

He also says:

> Your best bet is to yry 7z to uncompress the zip file with AES encrypted entries.

So why not just do that and call it a day?

Because this does not only happen to unzip and I want to find a solution in general.

What do you mean exactly with "this"? The upstream unzip doesn't support AES_WG. How should a general solution look like?

Find a working binary (or source code, then compile one) and replace it manually. Is it not possible?

> choco and scoop

And winget.

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