Lots. Because many upstream projects don't have their build system set up to work within a distribution (to get dependencies form the system and to install to standard places). All distros must patch things to get them to work.
Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.
There seems to be a serious issue with Debian (and by extension, the tens of distros based on it) having no respect whatsoever for the developers of the software their OS is based on, which ends up hurting users the most. Not sure why they cannot just be respectful, but I am afraid they are shoveling Debian's grave, as people are abandoning stale and broken Debian-based distros in droves.
Needless to say, Zawinski was more than a little frustrated with how the Debian maintainers do things.
But honestly, this took 30 seconds to Google and was highly publicized at the time. This whole "I never heard of this, link??" approach to defend a lost argument when the point made is easily verifiable serves to do nothing but detract from discussion. Which, you know, is what this place is for.
I wasn't defending anything; searching for xscreensaver debian debacle yielded links that might or might not have been what you were referring to, They did not, however, yield a link to the JWZ site.
I use the `vnlog` and `feedgnuplot` shell tools HEAVILY to do data analysis and visualization. In emacs, these work well in shell-mode or in any buffer with `shell-command-on-region` (M-|). Not strictly emacs, but works great.
Maybe it's a fallacy and maybe it isn't. But I often hear people say "I don't use tool X because it doesn't actually increase my productivity". X is emacs or debuggers or profilers or Linux or version control or code comments or whatever. And after observing such people work over time I decided that most of them are just trying to justify their laziness. YMMV.
This is the ROS way: add more layers of crap on it until it sorta kinda works sometimes. If you want "reproducible package management", use Debian. ROS1 is already in stock Debian. Some of ROS2 is as well. If you actually want ros to suck less, please package the reset of ROS2, and push it to Debian.
Pretty much yeah, I remember I did some work with ROS2 after 1, and since then I always prefer to build from scratch, cleaner, simpler, and in many cases far better results too.
Sometimes (probably most times) you don’t have the privilege of choosing the OS, for example, if you have to use a Jetson SBC you will mostly use the default ubuntu so you can utilize the nvidia drivers for the cuda cores.
Debian is a terrible dependency management solution for adding development dependencies to a workspace (e.g. the same sort of thing npm, cargo, and uv are used for).
As far as I can tell, pixi brings the benefits of these types of dependencies, with native support for multiple languages (python and c++ being the big ones).
ROS uses debian packages today (inside a convoluted wrapper), imo it would be much better if it went all in on pixi instead.
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