One can make a reasonable argument to run apps in containers/flatpack if they are unmaintained or closed source, but libraries should absolutely come through the distribution’s update mechanism.
The reality is that while there might be ways to get libraries updated faster otherwise, the vast majority of computers would run totally outdated libraries if there wasn’t an automated update mechanism through the distribution. Yes, it might break some apps from time to time, but that is IMHO a sign of a badly designed and insecure app that you should probably not run that way in the first place (see 1st part).
And your example of NodeJS etc. is actually a good example of a fundamentally broken & insecure dependency system leading to problems developing and also running the software often requiring virtual environments or containers to emulate a system-state exactly like the developer had.
(P.S.: many of the small annoyances one can have with outdated libraries and apps can be avoided by running a rolling release distribution like Arch)
Hmm, I think you got it exactly backwards ;)
One can make a reasonable argument to run apps in containers/flatpack if they are unmaintained or closed source, but libraries should absolutely come through the distribution’s update mechanism.
The reality is that while there might be ways to get libraries updated faster otherwise, the vast majority of computers would run totally outdated libraries if there wasn’t an automated update mechanism through the distribution. Yes, it might break some apps from time to time, but that is IMHO a sign of a badly designed and insecure app that you should probably not run that way in the first place (see 1st part).
And your example of NodeJS etc. is actually a good example of a fundamentally broken & insecure dependency system leading to problems developing and also running the software often requiring virtual environments or containers to emulate a system-state exactly like the developer had.
(P.S.: many of the small annoyances one can have with outdated libraries and apps can be avoided by running a rolling release distribution like Arch)