A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn’t even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple’s App Store and Play Store were a thing.

We can no longer do that thanks to Flatpaks and Snaps as well as AppImages.

Recently i upgraded my Fedora system. I few days later i found out i was runnig some older apps since they were Flatpaks (i had completely forgotten how I installed bitwarden for instance.)

Do you miss the old system too?

Is it possible to bring back that experience? A unified, reliable CLI solution to make sure EVERYTHING is up to date?

  • 30p87@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    I agree, but using yay, or rather the AUR, means being forced to use Arch. That’s not only annoying for the average Debian/shopless-distro-user that does not want to relearn their system, or sysadmin who does not want bleeding edge software to host their website (as it may be your favorite machine learning ‘anime’ generator that’s going down due to Nvidia drivers). It’s also deadly for the 69 year old grandma as she somehow manages to use flatpaks (or whatever) on Ubuntu, but forgets to update them. Meanwhile she, very consciously, updates everything else through the Software Center every day (or lets it auto update). She wouldn’t survive that jump to Arch (and certainly wouldn’t survive the compile times of some AUR packages). Everyone suddenly using Arch would crash the whole ecosystem and community. Sysadmins would need to switch to Arch quickly now, as it’s development stales because no one uses it.

    The only solution would be, to create - yet again - a universal alternative to the AUR. Maybe someone, backed by eg. the Linux foundation itself, could create a good way of compiling AUR packages on every system. Now we would still have to somehow drop Flatpacks and Snaps (especially the latter), which some Distros will refuse to do. Canonical isn’t going to yeet snaps out of the Store because it’s shit and something better exists (because that would apply to the whole distro /s)