Yeah... Ubuntu packages are never up to date on release date. They freeze them months before so they can iron out any bugs with the versions they picked. You don't pick Ubuntu or any point release distro to get up to date packages.
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Damn. Even today there is yet a new release again of rocm. We need to compile it constantly from source.
Apt packages aren't build for this current era of fast shipping and improvements.
there’s a world of options. this is an LTS distro. use Arch or Nix or whatever if you want the latest packages. i actually switched to NixOS because the CUDA drivers were too new on Arch, and i wanted a better way to pin versions.
or i dunno keep publicly complaining about it until someone does the work for you
I don’t think I know what rocm is 🤪
Especially with the newer ROCm 7.2.x releases improving hardware support and other improvements. Especially with the rate of improvements to ROCm recently, it's unfortunate to see ROCm 7.1 shipped in the Ubuntu 26.04 archive.
Improvements!
But yeah, 3 months out of date for software that isn't security critical is fine. Probably just hit the feature freeze at a bad time. It still presumably works well enough for most people.
3 months isn't bad though. Especially since it's going to be locked out of changes so in 5 years it will be 5 years and 3 months out of date. The bigger problem with rocm is that they cut off older cards way too soon.
I bought a radeon pro vii brand new from a shop (granted it was a runout sale) and it was already cut off. It still works but not supported.
AMD can't keep complaining everyone focuses on CUDA when they don't even bother to support their own product. It supports very few cards and they get cut off way too soon.
Nvidia supports even midrange consumer cards and they keep supporting them a long time.
Being old != bad. Some software is not critical in terms of cyber security. You have to assess the use case. Feels like you're screaming wolf, without knowing the package.
Ehh. 7.1 isnt that old. If they don't make any newer available until 28.04, then this'll just be a major baseline. It'll nice regardless just if it leads to more rocm support. The package and maintainers are in place for this to keep going every 6 months
Or this is why we are moving to a rolling-release model.
Yeah, would much rather a package designed for my distro than a flatpak.
I recall a time where the native package on my distro wasn’t working at all, I think this was when I was using discord and tried to use Vencord on Debian 12, so I tried the flatpak version and again it did not work. I was between a rock and a hard place, do I troubleshoot what is essentially a containerized/sandboxed application or try to figure out what’s going on my host machine.
I chose the latter and eventually got it working, but now I don’t use discord so waste of my time regardless.
Hot take: Windows handles this stuff so much better.
Apt packages used to get more updates in the past. Especially ubuntu repos. Today everything just seems to rely on Debian. Which is always lacking behind.
I don't like it either. Especially for gaming you really want the latest improvements. Or for science workloads. Or other professionals.
This is fine as long as upstream supports a convenient way to get the latest versions of software for which you actually need latest (APT repositories)
Stable base, only explicitly allow selected unstable/bleeding edge components.
This is what I do for ROCm and a few other things which need to be constantly updated (yt-dlp). Sometimes stable-backports repositories are enough, but not always.
Ironically, that stability is probably why AMD target Ubuntu. They don't want everything else on the bleeding edge. Just their bit.
The problem is that there's so many different ways of packaging and also that Windows generally does static linking so old binaries work after a decade. Whereas old Linux binaries are generally dynamically linked and are dependent on some other old library which isn't availible for [current kernel] and you get into dependency hell
so, it’s the same.
saying “Linux does dynamic linking and Window does static linking” is both false and a mischaracterization. Windows absolutely does dynamic linking with its Dynamically Linked Libraries (.dll). how dependencies are linked is up to the developer and whatever hardware constraints. one reason i like Rust is that it prefers static linking, and a lot of tool chains are moving in that direction. the reason Linux distros push people toward their internal package management tools (eg apt) is to have tighter control over dynamic linking.
and we’re also glossing over scoop and chocolatey and winget and Docker.
but that’s where you get to stuff like flatpack and snap and Nix that try to contain the dynamic dependencies.
i don’t think downloading exes hoping that Windows has stuffed enough DLLs into the OS and just running them is a better solution.
That's true but on Windows it's mostly just clicking install on everything on ninite. Linux libraries sometimes can't even install on a newer kernel.
I can usually get old Windows programs to run on newer Windows versions. On Linux I rarely had that sucess.
Linux libraries sometimes can't even install on a newer kernel.
i’m curious where you run into this. i’ve never had this issue in 10 years of using Linux, most of which being on Arch with the latest kernel
Trying to do something like run ROS on anything but the Ubuntu distro it was made for.
Flashing an embedded board which requires Ubuntu 20.04 and didn't accept me using 22.04
Some more stuff too but I've forgotten
oh i see. embedded systems makes sense. i wouldn’t even try to go beyond the factory recommendation for systems like that. maybe for fun. likely there are kernel modifications or modules that are required for those systems.
Idk it's not just on embedded systems. For example you can't run ros 22.04 on Ubuntu24.04 ** https://docs.ros.org/en/humble/Installation/Ubuntu-Install-Debs.html
Windows doesn't have these issues. Not that I use Windows for development stuff, but you can usually install any .exe for Windows10 on Windows 11. Even older stuff frequently still works and only sometimes requires running in compatibility mode.
ROS is an embedded systems OS, right?
Surprise! A Debian based distro uses antique packages! Who would have seen that coming? 🙀 /s
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