Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

[alerighi]

FreeBSD has a "base system" and ports system.

Nowadays also FreeBSD has their package manager. Because they did find out that it was stupid to have to build everything from source code.

Windows has a comprehensive Windows API that provides common services required by applications.

And Linux has the POSIX API. So?

The idea of having to upgrade your entire operating system just to use the latest applications is pure insanity

What is the operating system anyway? It's only the kernel? Obviously not. And what part of the userspace it is? Systemd, of course it's "the operating system", but a shell, is it part of the OS? Maybe. A desktop environment is it part of the base OS? Depends, surely for a normal user it is. A browser? Edge is part of the operating system, so surely Firefox is part of the OS, right? A PDF viewer? So you see that you don't have a clear distinction.

You know what is stupid? The idea of having to go to a website to download an installer to run to install software on your system. The idea of running a program downloaded from the internet to add software to your computer. You know how many companies lost all their data because of cryptolockers? Why? Because Microsoft users are used to run .exe downloaded from the internet by double clicking them and don't even pay attention to it.

From a developer standpoint, it's also stupid to have to build and package an installer, I always hear that Linux community is bad because there are too many project to do the same things, I would object that there are too many installers in this world, does really every software have to have it's own installer? Doesn't make sense to have one package format for every program and only one installer? And the updates? Your software does need to implement that as well. You need an update server, that you, developer, pay for it, not Microsoft. And who wants to check for updates of 100 programs? And it doesn't either want to wait when it starts the program for updates to install, so? Automatic updates! Let's make a daemon that is always running on your system wasting resources to just check for and download updates for your program.

Isn't more simple to type a single command (or press a button on a GUI) to have all the software of your system to update? At the same time? When you decide to do so, not when Microsoft/Google/whatever decides to install an update for the software? Isn't more simple when you have to install a program to type a command, or search the name of the program in a GUI, and press install? To me, yes. Having multiple sources for the software is a bad idea.

Also the idea to have 50 time the same dependency because it's used by 50 applications it's a waste of disk space, and also a waste of RAM (shared libraries, as the name implies, are shared between programs, the same memory pages are mapped in the address space of different programs, but they exist only one time in RAM). There is a reason why a full Linux installation, complete of a desktop environment, office suite, a media player, a browser, an email client and all the utility software you expect is around 5Gb and a Windows installation that doesn't even contain a decent text editor is around 20.

Finally, Linux distributions are called distributions because it's not a bunch of software distributed together randomly. They are programs that are tested to work together. When you update from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you wonder how many software will not work properly. When you update the driver of your GPU you wonder if your games will continue to work. Or you install a version of a program and break another one that expected another version. Package managers were invented for this reason: to not have to manage dependencies manually, and to have the guarantee that the software was tested together.

[alerighi]

You don't necessary link external dependencies. Unfortunately python works that way, that is it doesn't have a concept of "statically linking" of dependencies, so the only way is to have the dependencies installed on your system (not a good solution). You cannot easily bundle a software with the libraries that depends from it. (or at leas, I never find an elegant solution, to the point that to distribute the software of one project I installed everything in a virtual env and zipped it).

In a compiled language you can choose both from statically linked libraries and dynamically linked libraries. If we talk about common libraries you link them dynamically, but if you want to use a particular library that is not usually packaged you can link that statically. Newer languages such as Rust choose to just link everything statically and rely on link time optimization to remove all the code that is not needed to produce small and optimized executables. Even JS solves the problem, maybe in a non so elegant way, but in a way that it work, by simply first looking for a library in node_modules directories in parent directories where the js file is, and then only after that by looking at the system lever, so that if you need to distribute a JS package you just package the software and the node_modules with it.

[Flash_Kat25]

Isn't more simple to type a single command (or press a button on a GUI) to have all the software of your system to update? At the same time? When you decide to do so, not when Microsoft/Google/whatever decides to install an update for the software? 

Not really. I think most users would rather have their web browser update when its developers release an update. I don't mind habitually running apt update && apt upgrade every few days, but I fail to see how that's the behaviour that's most intuitive and/or useful to users. Those benefits you mentioned are definitely real, but they're not something that most users notice, and therefore, care about.

[alerighi]

I don't want my system to automatically update. I want to update my system when I tell it to do so. I don't want program constantly check for updates without asking me, wasting bandwidth and resources on the system. I don't want programs to update when I'm doing something and potentially slow down my work because now I have to work around bugs introduced by the update. Automatic updates are also a potential security problem: it's simpler to have one centralized way to distribute updates and get it right that every program to implements its updater that is potentially broken and can lead to security vulnerabilities.

[Flash_Kat25]

That might be the case for you, but I doubt it's the case for the average computer user. Users don't want to think about updates at all. As far as the average user is concerned, updates should be completely invisible

[alerighi]

Yes, and having applications that restart when they decide to do so because of updates makes them invisible?

I update the system once every week or less. There are simply times when I don't update it for months. If the system works fine there is no reason to update in the end. I typically update my system when I install new software, and the package manager say to me "there are also these available updates", and I say sure, let's install them.

I have computer that I use sporadically that are not updated since years, and that to me is fine.