from Hacker News

Debian Needs a WinGet

by madspindel on 6/11/24, 8:39 AM with 12 comments

  • by happymellon on 6/11/24, 10:23 AM

    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.

  • by anthk on 6/11/24, 9:02 AM

    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.

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 6/11/24, 9:18 AM

    "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.

  • by avhception on 6/11/24, 8:59 AM

    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!

  • by frankjr on 6/11/24, 9:40 AM

    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).

  • by brodouevencode on 6/11/24, 1:57 PM

    Why is this flagged?

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

  • by kevsamuel on 6/11/24, 10:36 AM

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