(January 21, 2015 at 7:17 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: So, I'm frustrated. In Windows land, programming software updates come with new versions of Visual Studio and the in-place service pack updates. There's up front cost (although, with the new Community Editions of VS, that's no longer going to be true), but installation and updates is mindless. It just works. And I struggle to think of why that can't be the case with linux
One of the bolded things has a great deal to do with the other.
(January 21, 2015 at 7:17 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: even accounting for differences in distros.
I'm also amazed that the software vendors themselves - Apache, PHP, etc. - don't have their own official repos one can point their package manager to. I mean, I'd love to simply point at something like PHP-5.6-Debian and have it always give me the latest stable release.
Do you have any idea how many Linux distros there are, not to mention how many versions of each (which, when dealing with system tools, very frequently matters a great deal).
(January 21, 2015 at 7:17 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: I dunno... linux has always felt unnecessarily fiddly and complex to me. It's too simple to screw things up, and things that are messed up don't give much in the way of descriptive language explaining why. I hate having to deal with configuration issues regularly.
I hear you, particularly on the lack of documentation for many open source projects. A couple of points though, from someone who works with this shit for a living: choose open source tech wisely. Look at the quality of the documentation before you choose a software component.
There's also a very good reason why distro system tools lag behind the bleeding edge: because integration testing takes resources. You can always roll your own from source, or go to third-party repositories, but in the either case, if you break it, you own both parts, and that's about it. If you care about stability and uptime, leverage the distro maintainer's testing process.
There are tradeoffs, yes. You can't have your cake (integrate a stable OS with bleeding edge parts) and eat it too (expect stability).
