[GTALUG] keeping my systems updated: Windows vs Linux

[Nicholas Krause]

On 3/8/22 18:33, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> | From: Nicholas Krause via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> 
> [I've cut out the quotation of my message since Nicholas' message
> doesn't seem to respond to it.]
> 
> | I did this
> 
> What's "this"?
> 
> | a while ago, but I noticed that exes were about twice as slow
> | as yum at the time.
> 
> What are exes?  Do you mean Windows .exe files?  Those are executable
> files.  How do they compare with yum, a package management program.
> 
> yum has been replaced by dnf.  If you type "yum" on fedora, you get
> dnf.  If I remember correctly, "yum" stood for Yelllowdog Updater,
> Modified (Yellowdog Linux was a distro for POWER7).
> 
> dnf is mysteriously powerful.  At least mysterious to me.  It solves
> dependencies using a SAT solver!
> 
> | It was even worse for apt, about 3 times.
> 
> Perhaps you are saying that apt is 50% faster than yum.
>  From other comments, it might be more than tis.
> 
> | Windows
> | packaging in exes is not that fast is the problem.
> 
> Ahh.  I guess you don't know the name of the Windows package manager
> but you are saying the packages are actually executables.  Odd!
> 
> I call the Windows package manager "Windows Update" -- that's the name
> I invoke to get updates.
> 
> When I try to look at what is taking time with Windows Update, it is
> kind of hard because of the way services are agglomerated.  It looks as
> if one piggy thing is anti-malware.  Surely a decent cryptographic
> signature system could eliminate the need for that.
> 
> | If we're talking speed,
> | packaging in Arch wins. Even in a VM with 2GB
> | of RAM and 2 cores. It was able to do the install portion of 500MB
> | of software in 32-33 seconds. I believe that's 30 plus packages from
> | memory.
> 
> Speed isn't my favourite metric.  Correctness, safety, and dependency
> management seem pretty important.  Otherwise tar would be the winner.
> 
> I have no idea how well arch's package manager does on those other
> concerns.  It might be great.
> 
> I mostly use dnf -- RPM packages.  You really have to trust the
> packager since I think that the package's scripts are run as root.

I was just curious about that. Of course, I don't think it's the only
benchmark.

As to the Arch Linux comments about a user, I have been planning on switching
at some point. I've three primary reasons:

1. Basically only installs what I want, which is nice. The core packages
are at most 500MB which is small for the desktop. Last I played with it
my Arch install on a VM was about 5GB or so smaller than Fedora with the
same packages plus the default system install.
2. Very lightweight i.e. I got Fluxbox to run in under 32MB of ram i.e.
around 17-24MB. For vanilla XFCE from memory, people have got it to run on
less than 64MB of ram. That's with all the modern standard features on
a x86_64 bit modern distro.
3. Most of the packages are just vanilla upstream which I think is useful,
at least for me. There at most a few minor packages applied.

Sorry for the confusion Hugh,

Nick
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