this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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[–] realharo@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Native package managers were not "working fine for everyone", the software and libraries in them are often very outdated and contain custom patches that don't come from the original software authors.

So you often end up dealing with bugs that were already fixed and the fixes released months ago.

That's one of the main reasons I use a rolling release distro. I used Arch for years, and now I use Tumbleweed.

With packaged apps (like flatpak, snap, etc), you can end up with outdated dependencies in those apps because they bundle everything together. So instead of fixing bugs once for everyone, you have to pester each individual package maintainer to update the dependencies. However, this is mitigated by having these apps be somewhat containerized and limiting impact of a breach on other apps, so YMMV depending on what kind of sandboxing you use.

I'm not really decided here, and I use both flatpaks and distro packages. I don't touch snaps though.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

That sounds like the maintainer's problem, not a problem with apt/dnf/whatever. We've had automated build processes for decades. If you want stable, use a stable distro; if you want the latest, use a rolling release like Arch or something.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 1 points 1 month ago

Other distros were faster with updating packages, or for Ubuntu specifically you had PPAs or repositories maintained by the vendor.