# Why is juliaup emphasized as the installation mechanism?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-is-juliaup-emphasized-as-the-installation-mechanism/134844>\
**Category:** Tooling\
**Created:** [January 2, 2026, 4:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-is-juliaup-emphasized-as-the-installation-mechanism/134844 "2026-01-02T16:49:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [January 2, 2026, 5:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-is-juliaup-emphasized-as-the-installation-mechanism/134844/2 "2026-01-02T17:09:26Z")

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I’ve split this from the VSCode default setting topic; if you have concrete examples of where Juliaup was failing you and your students, it’d be hugely beneficial!

A good answer to the core of your question is here:

> [@Juliaup: a modest suggestion](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/juliaup-a-modest-suggestion/128465/19):
>
> Besides the automatic updates and the ability to easily run old versions in projects—two extremely good and compelling reasons—here are four other reasons for juliaup to have become the standard, recommended way to install Julia. People want to do apt-get install julia or brew install julia and use their distro package manager to install Julia. Unfortunately, distros seem mostly incapable of packaging Julia in a way that isn’t deeply broken. There’s a few notable exceptions, but this is prett…

I also _love_ the simple standalone install. In my experience, the standalone installer works great for the first version the first time. It gets more complicated and unwieldy as you keep using the language and start updating and managing multiple versions. But, yes, that’s a different case than a course where you _don’t want_ folks to update!

It’s also worth noting that a graphical installer/manager for juliaup is something that has been talked about at length in the past — and I’m guessing that’d helpful for your audience.

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