microsoft
make Edit available via packages.microsoft.com
Hi there, I'm a fan of MS products on Linux, especially on Ubuntu. Please make it possible to download, install, and update MS Edit via packages.microsoft.com, like it does for MS Edge or MS Intune Portal. The snap version will also be good enough! This tool is really cool, but not all Ubuntu users are Linux geeks, so it will be hard for them to use the source code and update the tool manually.
As I was writing a positive response, I just realized that this is likely impossible. Ideally, msedit requires libicu as a dependency. Linux distributions all suffix ICU export symbols with their major version and ICU releases a new major version twice a year. So, the only way for us to release on packages.microsoft.com would be to have a package for each possible ICU version you may want to use, which is at least a dozen versions across popular Debian-based distributions.
I don't want that. I don't think anyone wants that. So, perhaps snap packages are the only solution?
The conclusion is probably, as usual: Dynamic libraries on Linux pretty much suck. I sometimes feel like we'd already live in the year 3000 if they worked like they do on Windows. Don't quote me on that. 😄
