Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server<p>- HEADLINE: Built-in support for installing up-to-date packages<p>- DESCRIPTION: Currently, `apt install [package]` on LTS Ubuntu will install a package that is up to 24 months out of date (or more if you&#x27;re not on the latest LTS).<p>Literally one month ago, using the latest version of Windows 10, I installed Ubuntu for Windows (which installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS), and `apt-get install nodejs` installed Node 0.10 (from 2013! in 2017!).<p>I understand users want stability in the core OS, but there&#x27;s no reason it should be made so difficult to install up-to-date software from elsewhere. `apt` is useless for installing things like `youtube-dl` because old versions of youtube-dl quickly stop being compatible with YouTube.<p>Ubuntu&#x27;s current solution to this problem is PPAs, which are very non-ideal because they only work if someone maintains a PPA, but this involves:<p>1. googling for the software&#x27;s PPA, 2. finding the PPA, 3. possibly trusting a third-party PPA maintainer, 4. running at least three different commands, which you have to either memorize or re-google<p>Basically all software&#x27;s Ubuntu installation instructions are something like &quot;curl this script and pipe to bash&quot; or &quot;build from source&quot; or &quot;install this other package manager, then use the other package manager to install our software&quot;, just because it&#x27;s impossible to install the latest version using Ubuntu&#x27;s built-in package manager out-of-the-box.<p>For instance, here&#x27;s Redis: &quot;Installing it using the package manager of your Linux distribution is somewhat discouraged as usually the available version is not the latest.&quot;<p>I want to be able to do something like `apt install-latest youtube-dl` to get a usable version of youtube-dl, and considering the number of workarounds for this issue I find online, I think a lot of other people have the same want.<p>- ROLE&#x2F;AFFILIATION: owner of a top-2000 US website