I admit I haven’t used Ubuntu in years, so I didn’t think they were that bad. Thanks for the info, it made me learn a dependency hell scenario I never thought about before.
I wanted to use the up to date version of FFMPEG, had to download the binary from the website. Wanted to install some program that needed the latest version of KDE, had to install a PPA which updated a lot of packages and at the end it would break many other apps installed from other PPAs.
At some point I realized using Arch was just much less work than worrying myself about all the dependencies that could break when you don’t stick to what’s available in their official repositories.
Debian technically has the same issue but people who want Debian usually stick to stable + backports so it’s less frequent.
Yeah that’s why distributions which put all their community packages in one place with the same dependencies are more resilient in this respect.
Arch’s AUR is not perfect either, you can have packages that list dependencies badly or replace core packages so you can still mess up but in a different way.
NixOS seems to have hit on a very robust formula that lets packages coexist with minimal friction.
I admit I haven’t used Ubuntu in years, so I didn’t think they were that bad. Thanks for the info, it made me learn a dependency hell scenario I never thought about before.
It’s basically one reason I stopped using Ubuntu.
I wanted to use the up to date version of FFMPEG, had to download the binary from the website. Wanted to install some program that needed the latest version of KDE, had to install a PPA which updated a lot of packages and at the end it would break many other apps installed from other PPAs.
At some point I realized using Arch was just much less work than worrying myself about all the dependencies that could break when you don’t stick to what’s available in their official repositories.
Debian technically has the same issue but people who want Debian usually stick to stable + backports so it’s less frequent.
Yeah that’s why distributions which put all their community packages in one place with the same dependencies are more resilient in this respect.
Arch’s AUR is not perfect either, you can have packages that list dependencies badly or replace core packages so you can still mess up but in a different way.
NixOS seems to have hit on a very robust formula that lets packages coexist with minimal friction.