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How Debian Packaging Works (joyfulbikeshedding.com)
6 points by FooBarWidget on Aug 5, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Why is Debian packaging such a terrible process, according to this post? Wouldn't it be a great thing if one of the oldest and most important distros made packaging simple? One of the problems people have with Linux is that software isn't as simple to acquire. Sure, the main repos are easy, but what if it's not there? You have to figure out how to install .debs or .rpms or appimages or unzipping tar.gz's. Non technical people do not want to deal with that. Non technical people will reinstall Windows if they have to deal with that.

One of Window's advantages is that nearly every piece of software you want has an installer that handles everything for you. Now, downloading installers straight from distributors is a bad model, but if we want our model to work, we need to make packaging easier. Or saner, at the very least.


> You have to figure out how to install .debs

I don't know about your system, but on mine it's a double click. Linux has plenty of real issues. Ease of installing packages is not one of them.




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