[Discuss] Package Management is Bane of Latex

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2016-09-26 11:01-0700 George Farris wrote:

> Well I always like to encourage people to be life long learners and
> changing your distribution can be a very positive experience.
> I like Debian, ran it for years, it's still on my laptop but Arch is just
> sooo. much nicer for me.  A great rolling distro and I don't have to wait
> months for the next update to a package to appear.  Debian just seems stale
> once you used Arch.  But hey, each to his own:-)
>
> Try it you might like it.

Hi George:

I prefer to do creative research work and learning using my desktop
computer rather than spending my creative energies fiddling with that
computer too much.  So I admit to being fairly conservative about
trying new desktops.  In fact, I am still running Debian stable (which
is now ~1.5 years old which indeed makes it quite stale).  But if I
get too fed up with that staleness, I plan to switch to Debian testing
which is a rolling release which a lot of Debian desktop users prefer
to use over stable. (In fact, I believe Debian was the distribution
that first invented the concept of rolling releases many years ago.)

Just out of curiosity, did you actually try Debian testing before you
largely gave up on that distro?  The last time I tried Debian testing
there were typically many package updates per day so the impression I
got at the time (several years ago) was it was pretty close to the
cutting edge.

Alan

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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