this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2022
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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).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.