Dependency hell happens when you try to go against your distro and install something. Someone who used Linux for 20 years probably found a distro that works well for them, hence the no dependency hell.
Or they just stopped tinkering. Either case is solvable by Nix/Flatpak/Bedrock/20+ other solutions
Yeah, could have worded that better. I’ve had some dependancy issues here and there over the years, especially in the early days (20+ years ago) but since like 5 years or so I haven’t seen anything
I’m genuinely curious too. Was there a big update? Bad interaction with the new plasma? I know they added av1 last year but I looked like a week ago and atsc 3.0 and ac4 audio still didn’t work.
Or they just use a distro that doesn’t frequently break dependencies. I used to experience lots of dependency issues on Ubuntu many years ago. Been on Arch for ~10 years and have only had 1 dependency issue, which was fixed within 1 day.
Haven’t had any major dependancy issues for years on Ubuntu. Maybe tiny things where I had to manually download a package somewhere because I use external repos, but those are easy fixes.
It’s common on Ubuntu/Debian. They’re stable releases, plus there are repos for them all over the place. This unfortunatelly leads to dependency hell, sooner or later. If you use only the provided repos, that will most likely never happen.
I’ve been on Ubuntu for decades now, and I’ve done some crazy shit in my time. External repos indeed do increase a risk-of but it’s exceedingly rare and easier to fix these days
That is true… though dll hell was also somewhat of an issue with Windows, but they managed that with WinSxS.
This is why rolling release distros are the way to go for desktops. I found this out early on. But, on the other hand, I get that people in corporate environments like to use stable releases.
I would suggest Void as a really stable rolling release distro for personal use (corporate probably won’t go with this, there is no legal entity backing the distro, it’s just a bunch of people maintaining it). It’s not bleeding edge like Arch, but more like cutting edge. They do pick and choose when to update/upgrade to stable releases of kernels and other packages, so it really is a lot more stable than Arch.
Sounds like that tool was badly packaged then, as no package install should just bork up other packages, let alone your gui. A SEO tool definitely has nothing to do there, so yeah, bad package. Always check what the package manager tells you before installing
I mean luckily distro maintainers usually deal with it (quite a lot of work) but have any additional repos and it gets wonky if those are not in total lockstep.
Yeah, that is true as well. I meant Debian/Ubuntu because it has the most 3rd party repos available. But yes, if you have more than one package manager, then things will most likely go south after a while as well.
Well not two different package managers but just two repos from different people (so hard to keep deps in sync). Packman (the third party codec repo for openSUSE) is slower to update compared to official repos, which often results in a situation where a thing from Packman requires a different version of a library than stuff from official openSUSE repos. But in that case it is easy to solve (for the user) in that you’ll just have to wait a bit for Packman people to figure out the situation.
In over 5 years? Like when containers and flatpaks became popular and include all their dependencies? Or when RHEL8 introduced app streams to help combat dependency issues?
I just had one yesterday trying to get Mobile Verification Tookit going on my laptop. I mean I just had to manually find it and install it but it was still a very minor issue.
I get what you mean, especially regarding stuff like Python 2 vs 3 and the like. In that case it’s mostly an upstream issue. The Python devs disregarded this very important aspect and we’re stuck bearing with it.
Excepting those problem children, dependency hell is a solved problem. When people complain about it today I assume they either:
Are struggling with badly designed backwards/multi version compatibility of a specific library; OR
Never went through actual dependency hell, be it either early 00s Linux package managers or Windows DLLs. Then they see an easily solvable package conflict and think that is dependency hell.
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Damn near 25 year Linux user here, servers, desktops, everything. I haven’t seen a single dependency issue in over 5 years.
Quick question can you suggest some lotto numbers thx
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I get what you mean, but the way you worded it makes it seem like you experienced dependency hell for 20 out of 25 years…
Dependency hell happens when you try to go against your distro and install something. Someone who used Linux for 20 years probably found a distro that works well for them, hence the no dependency hell.
Or they just stopped tinkering. Either case is solvable by Nix/Flatpak/Bedrock/20+ other solutions
Yeah, could have worded that better. I’ve had some dependancy issues here and there over the years, especially in the early days (20+ years ago) but since like 5 years or so I haven’t seen anything
ffmpeg was like three weeks ago
What happened with ffmpeg ?
I’m genuinely curious too. Was there a big update? Bad interaction with the new plasma? I know they added av1 last year but I looked like a week ago and atsc 3.0 and ac4 audio still didn’t work.
Did that cause breaks on certain distros? No issues with it on Arch.
Hmm. I’m not finding anything on it now, but all my hosts at home started asking which package provider I wanted it from
ಠ_ಠ
So lucky ones do exist after all
Or they just use a distro that doesn’t frequently break dependencies. I used to experience lots of dependency issues on Ubuntu many years ago. Been on Arch for ~10 years and have only had 1 dependency issue, which was fixed within 1 day.
Haven’t had any major dependancy issues for years on Ubuntu. Maybe tiny things where I had to manually download a package somewhere because I use external repos, but those are easy fixes.
It’s a personal anecdote, sure, bit I’ve seen this issue become a non-issue, really.
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It’s common on Ubuntu/Debian. They’re stable releases, plus there are repos for them all over the place. This unfortunatelly leads to dependency hell, sooner or later. If you use only the provided repos, that will most likely never happen.
Not really.
I’ve been on Ubuntu for decades now, and I’ve done some crazy shit in my time. External repos indeed do increase a risk-of but it’s exceedingly rare and easier to fix these days
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That is true… though dll hell was also somewhat of an issue with Windows, but they managed that with WinSxS.
This is why rolling release distros are the way to go for desktops. I found this out early on. But, on the other hand, I get that people in corporate environments like to use stable releases.
I would suggest Void as a really stable rolling release distro for personal use (corporate probably won’t go with this, there is no legal entity backing the distro, it’s just a bunch of people maintaining it). It’s not bleeding edge like Arch, but more like cutting edge. They do pick and choose when to update/upgrade to stable releases of kernels and other packages, so it really is a lot more stable than Arch.
Sounds like that tool was badly packaged then, as no package install should just bork up other packages, let alone your gui. A SEO tool definitely has nothing to do there, so yeah, bad package. Always check what the package manager tells you before installing
I mean luckily distro maintainers usually deal with it (quite a lot of work) but have any additional repos and it gets wonky if those are not in total lockstep.
That’s a Debian/Ubuntu specific issue. Repos all over the place, so yeah, you will break things eventually.
No it isn’t, any distro might have these issues if they have third party repos. openSUSE commonly has these conflicts with Packman.
Yeah, that is true as well. I meant Debian/Ubuntu because it has the most 3rd party repos available. But yes, if you have more than one package manager, then things will most likely go south after a while as well.
Well not two different package managers but just two repos from different people (so hard to keep deps in sync). Packman (the third party codec repo for openSUSE) is slower to update compared to official repos, which often results in a situation where a thing from Packman requires a different version of a library than stuff from official openSUSE repos. But in that case it is easy to solve (for the user) in that you’ll just have to wait a bit for Packman people to figure out the situation.
Oh, packman, I misread pacman 😁.
In over 5 years? Like when containers and flatpaks became popular and include all their dependencies? Or when RHEL8 introduced app streams to help combat dependency issues?
I just had one yesterday trying to get Mobile Verification Tookit going on my laptop. I mean I just had to manually find it and install it but it was still a very minor issue.
Yeah, to be honest, they’re less and less common, especially with rolling release distros.
But Flatpak packages don’t contain the Runtime dependencies. Those are shared among all Flatpak packages. AppImage bundles everything.
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I get what you mean, especially regarding stuff like Python 2 vs 3 and the like. In that case it’s mostly an upstream issue. The Python devs disregarded this very important aspect and we’re stuck bearing with it.
Excepting those problem children, dependency hell is a solved problem. When people complain about it today I assume they either: