If you want up to date everything you simply chose the wrong distro. It's not really the package manager's fault.
Debian goes for stable versions during a release and backports security patches. It's one of their main design philosophies. It really shines for boxes you want to run something for years with minimal maintenance.
Get arch, manjaro or another rolling distro and you'll have what you want :)
Or perhaps Ubuntu which is Debian based, but they put a lot of effort into decoupling the OS packages and libs from third party software using snap. It does have some drawbacks though like launching speed and integration. Personally I go the rolling way for my daily drivers.
I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that.
Snap is a nonstarter for me for many reasons. Startup speed is important for shell pipelines, and also it's insane to bundle that much stuff just to run a statically-linked binary. And it wouldn't even solve the version problem, it looks like ripgrep on Snap is two years old. https://snapcraft.io/ripgrep
It looks like manjaro is the most recommended arch distro so I'll give it a try.
> I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that.
That's a good point, but it's kind of part of the structure of a traditional linux system. Every library is provided only once in the system. Also, the line between what is "the OS" and "the userland apps" tends to be pretty blurry on Linux.
It has big advantages too. That libSSL vulnerability? apt dist-upgrade and all your apps that use it are patched. No need for each app developer to incorporate it. And the dynamic shared memory can do the things it's supposed to. Great for efficiency.
Solutions like snap indeed trade off that efficiency and single point of patching for easier deployment by devs, but it has too many drawbacks for me too. Though snap is exceptionally bad in terms of startup speed compared to FlatPak and AppImage so perhaps you could look at a distro that does that.
Manjaro kinda went off the deep end, I would recommend installing Arch manually, or maybe using Antergos.
Actually, Fedora may be better for your usecase. Assuming no proprietary drivers are required, it's a very simple install process, and tends to keep quite up to date software while remaining more stable than Arch.
Hmm for anything Rust I just always run ‘cargo install xxx’. I realize that doesn’t help you, but I’m surprised using the package manager is actually the most convenient cross-platform way to install.
That's true, I mentioned this in my post at first. But I removed it because Debian itself doesn't deem it stable and I didn't want to get into that whole discussion :)
But indeed Debian has a very different perception of the term 'stable' than Arch.
Debian goes for stable versions during a release and backports security patches. It's one of their main design philosophies. It really shines for boxes you want to run something for years with minimal maintenance.
Get arch, manjaro or another rolling distro and you'll have what you want :)
Or perhaps Ubuntu which is Debian based, but they put a lot of effort into decoupling the OS packages and libs from third party software using snap. It does have some drawbacks though like launching speed and integration. Personally I go the rolling way for my daily drivers.