logoalt Hacker News

curt15today at 12:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps? Some software defies such an easy categorization. If your default install doesn't come with docker and you install docker later for development, does that make docker a user-facing app? What about language toolchains like golang, rust, npm, etc?


Replies

mikae1today at 12:29 PM

> Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps?

If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too.

I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.

nxobjecttoday at 3:53 PM

It's an interesting question on Linux. On macOS entire toolchains would be fair game. I just ran `brew install colima`, `brew install llvm`, etc.

But clearly anything that would conflict with distro-specific opinionated decisions is out. Or DE-specific opinionated decisions. Maybe a good rule is "anything that would be useful simutaneously on all *nix".