Re: [Trisquel-users] I have long thought this about gnewsense,

[dguthrie]

I'm not saying PPAs don't have their place, but they seem to be more  
problematic than beneficial. There are many PPAs that can be described as  
dubious at best. Loads seem to be for software such as Steam so that they can  
be updated easily, which should certainly be discouraged.
I would agree with you about games, and also on things like the Nouveau  
driver which does get significant performance increases in new versions.
That being said, I find the backports system on Debian based systems quite  
sufficient (although I am currently also using the Debian unstable rolling  
release).
I'm also concerned about the nature of the PPA system, especially how the  
developers are not actually submitting finished .deb files, but a source deb  
to be built by Canonical's servers. Canonical have done some dubious stuff in  
the past, so it seems pretty centralised. Why can't there be a way of  
selecting the PPA source, so to speak? For example, with GIT, the format is  
git://some.url. Why can't it be ppa:some.url/repo? It seems badly designed in  
this regard to allow Canonical to control the system.
It seems that things that go wrong with PPAs are worse than the things that  
you miss by not including them. It really doesn't make the system more usable  
in my opinion, quite the opposite because it can make the system unstable  
through conflicts with other packages or dubious programs.
To be honest if you want the newest software it is better to use Debian  
unstable.