Glyph@miss_rodent Multiple distros means multiple platforms. Multiple platforms means multiple dev targets. Multiple dev targets means that developing for "Linux" is, at minimum, *many dozens of times more expensive* than developing for macOS, or Windows, or the web.
cthos 🐱@cthos @miss_rodent do they? experts seem to disagree
@glyph @miss_rodent I mean, I run several different distros across several different pieces of hardware, with different desktop environments and I can install Flatpaks on all of them, so yes?
@cthos @miss_rodent less flippant answer:
there are of course efforts to unify the platforms around certain abstractions which paper over the differences. and some of them (flatpak included) are even close enough to kinda work some of the time. but developing a flatpak and getting it deployed, while *possible*, does not have zero marginal cost per distro.
@cthos @miss_rodent and to the extent that it succeeds, it succeeds by creating a meta-platform, flatpak, that floats on top of the distro and makes all the distinctions between them irrelevant anyway. it also doesn't fully succeed (flatpak filesystem permissions are a user-interface nightmare)
@glyph @miss_rodent Do... do we need to discuss just how many apps run on Electron on Mac and PC?
@cthos @miss_rodent Electron is definitely a more successful Flatpak than Flatpak
@glyph @miss_rodent Cool, problem solved, just run Electron everywhere. 😈
@cthos @miss_rodent … and that's exactly why I wish Linux *were* a platform