Linux Package repositories

[molly]

I notice that most of the repositories I have used never have the most up to date software and I have to go and download it and install myself. I believe this is one of the reasons average people don’t like to use Linux.
I understand that a lot of people here do not want the latest, because a lot of the time it is not the best but surely the user should have the option to choose.
What repo's have you found to be good, bad and ugly…..

[Anon E. Moose]

If you want the latest slopware, use Arch (Pacman and AUR) or Gentoo (Portage).

If you are fine with "older" packages, but like security to be the main focus of getting updates, use Debian's security and updates repositories. Backports exists for select software like getting a newer kernel or drivers without switching to testing or Sid.

Slackware has no package manager, but you can use Slapt-Get as an example so you get automatic dependency tracking. I wouldn't recommend it over Debian's APT, because Slackware is very easy to break.

[sirfessor]

I used to hop on many distros but the one i am most comfortable with is APT, not out of technical reasons but for being familar with it.

I don't know how the scene is in the linux world right now but i wish if there was a distro that resembles old windows in how it handles programs, a solid stable base with updateable apps. I don't know how efficient flathub and snap in doing that but i remember they used to take a lot of space.

[moeloli]

A sane and well-designed OS would give you the freedom to get software from the developers' official websites or generally from any source you want (whether online or offline), instead of pretty much forcing you to use a centralized online repository and breaking if you update some programs but not others...

[digdeeper]

A sane and well-designed OS would give you the freedom to get software from the developers' official websites or generally from any source you want (whether online or offline), instead of pretty much forcing you to use a centralized online repository and breaking if you update some programs but not others...

Right. But does one exist?

[mocheryl]

A sane and well-designed OS would give you the freedom to get software from the developers' official websites or generally from any source you want (whether online or offline), instead of pretty much forcing you to use a centralized online repository and breaking if you update some programs but not others...

Like downloading the source code and building it yourself? That’s how it was done and still can be. Then came software repositories as a convenience method of delivering prebuilt binaries.

Unless you meant that developers should offer you their application on their website that you can just download and run. That’s not going to happen. It’s just not feasible. Too many architecture/OS/OS-version combinations. Maybe they can build for the popular ones like Win11 and AMD64/Linux and if their GitHub repo is hooked to a build pipeline they can add a few more, but that’s it.

[MiRw3b]

i mainly like pacman & the aur for the fact that they get updates for packages faster than debian, but the thing is that, and we can probably all agree, it frequently breaks, even on artix. if i had a ryzen 7 (and wasn't lazy) i would be on gentoo most likely, especially since you can configure portage to compile packages for your cpu's microarchitecture which i think is really cool, while you can't do that on arch unless you manually compile, or if you install from the aur a package that isn't a -bin you can configure your aur helper to do that but portage does it on all packages.

Else, i think APK (Alpine Package Keeper) is also really good and also pretty fast. tho, you might want to go in bleeding-edge to access newer packages and packages not yet in the normal repos..

[bongo]

I started using Void Linux a couple months ago and I'm pretty happy with how xbps works. I used Debian before that and found apt perfectly fine. Comparing the two, apt commands are more intuitive/human-readable IMO, but I personally haven't had trouble with learning xbps. The xtools utility makes some things much easier too.

[qualia]

A sane and well-designed OS would give you the freedom to get software from the developers' official websites or generally from any source you want (whether online or offline), instead of pretty much forcing you to use a centralized online repository and breaking if you update some programs but not others...

Right. But does one exist?

Microsoft Windows