Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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When Do Debian Packages Receive Updates? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm aware of Debian's reputation for not having the most up-to-date software in its repository but have just noticed that Thunderbird is on its current version. Which makes me ask:

When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?

I'm particularly interested in when it will make available the upcoming major release of GIMP to 3.0.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Guix is interesting. Do you know how it avoids clashing with Debian packages?

@[email protected] yes, it simply keeps all packages downloaded isolated in it's own database in the /gnu/store directory. It does not rely at all on any of the operating system's own packages except for /lib/ldlinux*.so. So if you install Gimp on debian via apt-get and then also install it with guix package, you will get two full copies of Gimp and all of it's dependencies. It is sort of like FlatPak, except the dependencies are tracked much more carefully, and it can do more deduplication to save space.

The Guix database itself is pretty interesting, it stores packages with their unique hash, so you can install as many different versions of any package as you want and it can still guarantee none of the versions will interfere with each other. You just select whatever version you want to use with the guix shell command.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

That all sounds extremely cool. I like that it's endorsed by the fsf as well. What's the catch? Is it hard to set up or run?