Package Management

casablanker

I've been looking around to see what Linux/Unix distribution I might migrate to, after many years of using Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop.

Solus caught my eye, specifically the V4 announcement etc. and I downloaded the latest version with the Budgie desktop.

I also spent some time reading the about pages and the philosophy behind Solus, the history, etc. makes for interesting reading.

The only thing that really caught my attention was a statement along the lines of "Solus will not be defined by it's package management", something to that effect. OK, I get that. There is more to a distribution than it's package manager.

It didn't occur to me till a few days later but the package management system is actually really important to me. In fact, I've often made choices, for or against a distribution, purely on the package management system.

Why is that so important to me, you might ask? Well, having used Ubuntu and Linux Mint for many years, I'm thoroughly familiar with DPKG and APT. I don't tend to use the gui much so prefer to use the apt commands to install a package. And they make it so easy!!!! The repositories are huge and most packages I want are already there and installed with a simple command. Worst come to worst, I can download the DEB package and install that manually with DPKG.

Which brings me to Solus. I have to be honest, I had never heard of this package manager. OK, I can learn how to use a new one. I've pretty much used them all, back to the old Red Hat days with RPM and then Suse and Mandrake I think... Then a couple of years with Arch and PacMan, etc.

Getting to my point... I think that the package management system does define a distribution, to a degree! I know from experience that if a distribution supports the APT system, I won't have any issues or problems, finding and installing software. To be honest, it is the package management system for Debian, Ubuntu, etc. that attracted me in the first place. It's just so easy! it works 99.99% of the time. I rarely have to waste my time manually compiling apps or try and resolve dependencies.

Many a little premature to make this observation? perhaps. It's just that if the package manager is going to be a stumbling block for me, I would rather know now and move on....

I guess what I'm asking is what the experiences have been with seasoned Solus users, using the eopkg system. Especially if like me you come from an APT background. Is software easy to find? what do you do if software is not in one of the repositories? compile manually?

cheers.

Harvey

My take on "not being defined by a package manager" - The end user should not give a crap what is under the hood. What is / is not in repository is another matter entirely.

If Solus switched to using apt tomorrow that alone does not magically make it compatible, because unlike Ubuntu, Solus is not based on Debian and is a rolling release. Base on something else and inherit a lot of their decisions at which point I start to question why it needs to exist at all.

casablanker It's just that if the package manager is going to be a stumbling block for me, I would rather know now and move on....

I guess what I'm asking is what the experiences have been with seasoned Solus users, using the eopkg system. Especially if like me you come from an APT background. Is software easy to find? what do you do if software is not in one of the repositories? compile manually?

I've been using Linux since the late 90s, most of my experience in Linux comes from working in IT. I've tried most distributions you are likely to have heard of and many you probably haven't but Solus is the one that made me get rid of Windows completely on my home systems. I've been using Solus for at least 2y 42w 1d (How long my IRC handle has been registered). If something is not in the repository I use universal packages such as snap/flatpak/appimage or compile it myself. Currently I use two things not in the repository. spotify (snap, technically also in the 3rd party section of the software center but I prefer snap over that) and barrier (compiled and packaged myself, it has been accepted into the repository I just need to submit it).

But ultimately I don't make decisions based purely on what if scenarios, I can't tell you what bests suits you and I can't tell the future so 🤷‍♂️ good luck.

DataDrake

casablanker I don't recall ever saying that, but I would say that people place far far too much importance on which package manager is used when all they really care about is which package formats are supported. I get that at this point in time deb and rpm are the most popular formats. From my perspective, this really only matters for Third-Party applications (things outside our repository, provided by developers) where they obviously aren't focused on providing eopkg compatible packages. That's fine. Solus isn't really big enough to be treated as a first0class citizen in that world.

Now there's also a key advantage to not supporting those formats: our system packages don't need to be compatible with the likes of Debian/Ubuntu or RHEL. That would be fundamentally incompatible with being a rolling-release, since we don't have some sort of LTS for developers to target. And that's not going to change because we would rather have more things up-to-date than support the oddball closed source application, which honestly should be shipping as a self-contained entity, with as little reliance on the system libraries as possible.

And then there are the people who complain about eopkg because they don't understand that every Tier-1 distribution has their own unique set of packages, regardless of the package format. They seem to think that there is some magical place somewhere where debs are made and that every distribution that uses them all pull from the same place. This is simply a fairy tale, and nothing else. Even in Ubuntu land there are huge swaths of packages that aren't pulled from Debian, and the same goes for many of its derivatives like Mint or Elementary.

Now, if you want to know what I care about as the person writing the replacement for eopkg, I'll happily summarize. First, I want it to be compatible with as much of the functionality that eopkg provides as is reasonable. This is most important to me because I don't want users to have to learn a new interface in addition to having to undo years of muscle memory from typing eopkg over and over. Second, I want the thing to be fast. As fast as possible. I want it to be something that you hardly ever spend much time using or thinking about because you spend so little time waiting for things to happen. Third, I want it to be reliable. I want it to succeed in what it is doing 99.999% of the time and when it does fail, to do so gracefully, without repercussions. Fourth, I want to be able to change package formats at the drop of a hat. Not because I want to support deb or rpm or <insert new hotness>. Instead, it allows me to improve our own package format for faster installs, smaller file sizes, and even smaller deltas.

And lastly, I never want you to have to use it. No, really. I want 99.9% of our users to be so happy with the Software Center that they never fell the need to drop to a terminal and call out to it directly. Not because I don't have a love for the CLI, trust me, I'm old-school to a fault at times. I just don't want anyone using Solus to be forced to do so. If you have to go to terminal for anything, I screwed up.

synth-ruiner

casablanker I actually think this attitude of trying to have every package under the sun included in the repos is one of Ubuntu/Mint's biggest flaws. If you have to have every package at any cost, it means a fair amount of them will be unmaintained, buggy, extraneous, or not a good fit with the intended user experience.

I would say that Solus forces me to take a problem-based approach ("what software can I use to accomplish task x?") instead of a solution-based approach ("I demand to use software y") but to be honest that would be a little unfair, since almost all the software I want is in the repos.

Also, sometimes you want software x, and it's not in the repos, but software y is and is actually a better experience. So I'm really a fan of the curated approach. 🙂

P.S. - former Mint XFCE user here!

kyrios

casablanker Actually your question is not about the package manager, nor about the packages format but about the amount of packages available which has nothing to do with a package manager.

Many user install/update applications from the software center so they don't care about the package format and people used to the CLI, can very quickly learn the commands (especially since eopkg is much easier than apt/dpkg)

It's clear from reading you that you have a preference for debian based distributions...

So I am not sure what's the aim of your message since you already know what you want !?

just

I'm on Solus with eopkg for six months only. Not a seasoned user, by no chance. Was - and still remain - on Arch with pacman for 10+ years. Before Arch, 5 years on Debian with apt. Yum, dnf, zypper, rpm, urpm[i,e,q,f] are also familiar to me. Never used graphical frontends.. CLI package managers are more powerful and informative.

eopkg is not as advanced and sophisticated as pacman, dnf or zypper. On the contrary, it's disarmingly simple. eopkg has some features I didn't see in other package managers. Rollbacks and snapshots are an example.

While with eopkg, compared to pacman and dnf, I still feel myself a bit underpowered, I must admit that it perfectly does 99% of the job.

Rarely used advanced features in other package managers are the remaining 1%. For example, eopkg cannot draw in terminal a full graphical tree of ascending or descending dependencies of a package, like pacman does. But most Arch users don't even know about this pacman's feature.

I'd say that eopkg takes the same approach as Solus in a whole - to be friendly and simple to use.

As for software not found in Solus repo. I either use already compiled, static application releases - they're sometime available on GitHub or elsewhere , - or, rarely, unpack by hand a package from other distro and place its content into corresponding Solus directories. A very bad and dangerous practice, so I limit it to bare minimum. Actually, there's only 1 simple package, added to Solus in this way.

To summarize. eopkg is a matter of habit. Don't confront it against more powerful counterparts. eopkg does all needed job in Solus very well. I'm gradually falling in love with it for its simplicity.

Regards

casablanker

just Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Cheers.

casablanker

Harvey I agree, it's not about what's under the hood for me either. It's just that knowing that a distribution is APT based (for example) instinctively gives me an impression as to what software is potentially available.

Yeah I'm aware of snap and flatpak etc. and maybe this is where the world is going and it won't matter any more what package manager a distribution uses as it becomes pretty much irrelevant.

Thanks for sharing, much appreciated.

casablanker

DataDrake re: Solus isn't really big enough... So are you saying that Solus is a niche player now and will remain that way? Then I'm curious to know who your target audience / user is?

As far as the APT repositories are concerned, my experience with this "ecosystem" has only been positive. It is rare for me not to be able to find the software I want in a supported format, and ultimately that is what matters to me.

You state that "I want 99.9% of our users to be so happy with the Software Center that they never fell the need to drop to a terminal" and "If you have to go to terminal for anything, I screwed up."

That is a lofty goal! I sincerely hope you get there because I think that if 99.9% of users will be happy with the Software Center, I would be too!

cheers.

brent

synth-ruiner I played with MXLinux XFCE a while (deb) and I was appalled at having 4-5 repos, none really explained. Overkill and unwise, I thought.

I share your take on repos.

v3l0ct

You also have the ability, like most other distributions nowadays, to install flatpaks and snaps for missing software in the repository. Not saying that's good or bad, just an option.

DataDrake

casablanker I'd rather be niche and doing it the right way than popular and making poor decisions left and right. We don't care about having every piece of software under the sun. That's a pointless waste of resources. We manage a repository of > 4000 source packages with > 10000 resulting packages, relying on regular contributions from fewer than 20 people and a development team of < 10 people, all in our spare time. If you can't find it in our repos, it's either old enough that you should consider shopping for a new piece of software, dead enough that no one is developing it, superseded by other programs of equal or greater quality and utility, new enough that you should be wary of it, or no one could be bothered to request it or volunteer to maintain it.

I'm only going to say this one more time: there is no such thing as an APT repository. There are distros doing the same packaging as us with hundreds of contributors, people willing to take up maintenance of long dead software, and show-runners who are OK with a repository littered with compatibility libraries for ancient software. They just happen to use APT as a front-end to dpkg.

We are not those distros and I would sooner disband the project than become one of them.

robgriff444

There's a 'neat, tidy and working' quality to Solus partly due to it's young age but probably more the attitude of Josh and the others who define the reason Solus exists.

For example Vivaldi is in the repo, and it's not in Ubuntu, you have to add it (after forum searches) and it's not officially recognized. This is not feasible for a new user (what's a repo?, register for a forum?, what's cli?).

Also, Ubuntu still haven't added Steam controller support (which was in Solus as soon as Arch had it in their wiki I think) - and this attitude (Ubuntu's) that the users know what they are doing so why do Ubuntu have to do anything flows into their SW availability - there is too much software and some of it (maybe a lot if I hazard a guess) that doesn't work well so there's another level of having to be an expert to cherry pick the software that works. Solus does a very good job with the available software and I wouldn't want it to offer everything and dilute the quality (as can so obviously be seen in Ubuntu).

On a tangent, I always preferred pacman (hated apt) and loved the verbose and technical things pacman did but as soon as I saw eopkg had a rollback function I was hooked. That's an RPG equivalent of a +100 stat shield replacing your old gloves, shoes, belt, rings etc that all added up to +17!

There's current vision at Solus, not much of that elsewhere unfortunately, too many people in the Linux world still clinging to 'technical ideals' that are more suited to programmers than users.

Also, what software do you want to use? We can all chime in with yays or nays and whys so you can make an informed choice, and from here, you can more easily predict future likelihood of availability of unseen requirements.