this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2022
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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All these "new kids on the block" like snap, flatpak and this other thing are complete crap. Distro maintainers just don't want to do their job anymore and roll off the effort so that devs have to do it.
Luckily I use a proper distro without these bullshit "app solutions"!
One of the primary goals is making less work for app developers who can now just make a flatpak and be done with it instead of making 30 different debs and rpms and such. The main reason flatpak has been so widely adopted has nothing to do with distro maintainers...it's that developers can make something everyone can use and not think about it beyond that.
Snap is just an extremely bad solution that works poorly with the additional issue of centralizing control in Canonical's hands.
Flatpak packager here -
Flatpak is actually seamless if the upstream is aware of it. With the exception of things like IDEs (which should have full system access) and daemons, the only issues Flatpaks run into are packaged apps that use things like their own File explorer instead of Freedeskop defaults (since Flatpak can't intercept custom file explorers and display their own prompt), etc.
So to summarize:
All I read there is that flatpak was made so that developers can do badly what would be the job of the distro maintainers and is not the job of the developer in the first place.
You realize developers generally package their applications for something regardless? The only difference on their end is that instead of making a deb or an rpm that will serve a fraction of Linux users, they can make a flatpak for all of them.
And distro maintainers/other third parties can and do make flatpaks all the time...Fedora for example creates their own flatpaks for basically everything in their repositories, and they're the biggest "true believers" in flatpak you can find. It's more work for them.
So you're telling me that everyone is burdening themselves with more work instead of focusing on what they are good at and is even happy with that?
You're really not responding in good faith and just looking for dunks. Clearly, when I said it was more work for Fedora maintainers I was providing an example of them going above and beyond to provide flatpaks as evidence for it not being a move of laziness. The Fedora project creating so many of them would not be necessary for flatpaks to work or to be useful.
It's fine to not like flatpaks. Sandboxing causes a lot of headaches for users that are still being ironed out. But it wasn't created out of distro maintainer laziness or a scheme to push all the work onto app developers. It was and is an attempt to make things easier for developers and to make applications available to every Linux user. And you know what? It's better now for me. Back in the day it was a lot harder to switch away from Debian-based distributions because everything you found would be a deb. If it was too obscure or new to have been picked up by distro maintainers, you were stuck building it yourself. Nowadays, when I find some tiny project on gitlab, the developer is much more likely to provide what they've made in a form I can actually use regardless of my choice of distribution. Everything is accessible to me and I never feel like I'm missing out like I did in the 00s. I wasn't happy with the packaging situation then, but now things are a whole lot better.
There is a "appimage" solution for developers. I.e. just make you app "fat" (let it bundles everything it needs into single executable), then user just downloads it and launches. Even automatic updates can be supported, afaik!
"Appimage" (and flatpack etc.) shoud not be used instead of standard disto packages, like firefox, chromium etc.
Packaging is on the distro maintainers and not the developers. Or at least it shouldn't be.
This was never the case even before all of these new solutions. When a developer makes something, they're going to release it for people to use. They generally are not going to just leave it sitting in a repo and let people figure out building it themselves until a distro maintainer happens to package it.
The traditional approach is very good for core components and staples of the desktop where distro developers can curate an experience where everything works with everything and is in harmony. It's not, however, very good at getting applications the end user cares about out there. Flatpak/Appimage and traditional packages complement each other nicely and cover each others' flaws.
So what's the point of having distros then? Why not jusy snapOS or flatpak OS?
Curation and guaranteed interoperability.
The best part of Linux is shared libraries and being able to see exactly what dependencies will be installed. With snap and flatpak all of the libraries ship with the package. You mind as well go back to windows if that's the way you wanna do things.
No thanks, I'll enjoy free software :)
What kind of a response is that? All you've said is thses alternatives are good because it makes it easier on the developers. So how have all these great free softwares come about over the past three decades without being distributed with their own libraries?
(One of) The reason they have been able to flourish is because they rely on the libraries all other free software projects rely on. Once you start down your path you will end up with super bloated systems with who knows what running 'sandboxed'.
Again, diatros exist to manage their package base. If something like Debian is too slow to integrate new packages into their stable repos then switch to a different distro that does.
You told me I might as well go to Windows, as if the only benefit of using Linux is its traditional approach to package management. I use it because I care about freedom, not because of how it handles package management, though I do happen to also like that (it's just better when supplemented by flatpaks and appimages).
If you read my other comments in this thread, you'll see why I prefer things as they are now: I can actually access most applications from most distributions without having to build shit myself. Before flatpak and the like, everything would just be a deb and if you're very lucky, an rpm. If it was not up to the standards of your distribution or, more likely, too obscure to be noticed by them, your only option was to build it yourself. Being a Fedora user in the 00s meant every time you found some cool new thing you wanted to try out, your only option was to fumble around and figure out how to build it yourself. It sucked, and was a big part of why Ubuntu dominated so heavily. If you went anywhere other than Ubuntu and Debian, you were just opting out of a huge amount of software.
Also, it's not just Debian Stable. Sid is too slow. Arch is too slow. Fedora is too slow. Ubuntu is too slow. Everything is too slow for the simple reason that maintainers can't know about every obscure application you could possibly care about and won't be packaging whatever random shit they find with a single star on github. Again: Traditional package managers are fantastic and have their place. While flatpak does deduplicate libraries through its runtime system and such to an extent, pacman and apt and dnf are much more efficient at doing so library-by-library, which is why (along with trusting distro maintainers to verify that everything works with everything else) I rely on them for the core parts of my system. There are many things they are simply better at. But when it comes to making it easy for developers to get their applications out into people's hands and for users to actually get access to the applications they care about, flatpak and appimage do that very well.
I'm going to leave it at that and dip, because I'm frustrated with being (what seems like deliberately) misread.