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?
@glyph @miss_rodent The list includes but is not limited to:
- Manjaro on a 2015 Macbook Air 11" with XFCE
- Bazzite on a Framework 13" with KDE
- ZorinOS on Starlabs Starlite (which IIRC is highly skinned GNOME)
- Vanilla Ubuntu on a weirdo 10" tablet PC thingie from Chuwi (Required some config to enable because Ubuntu really loves snaps and they shouldn't)
And all my applications just work.
@cthos @miss_rodent FWIW it's not *impossible* for this to work, but it is wildly beyond *cost-effective* for most ISVs
@glyph @miss_rodent I mean, I regularly come across Flatpak wrappers around software that the maintainers did not themselves package that also just works and is maintained by one person occasinally running a CI script though so I don't think this is necessarily true for all applications.
Also RE: filesystem permissions, it's now extremely rare that I have to fire up flatseal and make any changes at all for my normal software.
@glyph @miss_rodent The one exception I can think of is Ludusavi because it has to search a huge variety of places to locate game saves and I did have to grant it permissions to a weirdo directory (but that's also kinda on me for putting the games in a nonstandard place)
@cthos @miss_rodent I think I do have some nuanced structural critique of flatpak that I sadly don’t have time to get into right now, but if I am being honest most of my systems have a weird quirk where user data lives outside home directories on external media and this causes flatpak’s weird slightly-wrong but makes-things-mostly-work heuristics absolutely violently explode in ways which cause huge issues that contributes to an overall *immediate* negative impression
@glyph @miss_rodent Understandable, and yes, there are some pretty sharp edges.
Matt Campbell
Raven667@glyph @cthos @miss_rodent i think flatpak (and AppImage, not snap) are the closest thing to standardization you are going to be able to convince linux devs to make. The desktop linux platform already has a lot which is close across distros, all the large ones use systemd and pipewire, mostly use Wayland graphics and KDE or GNOME, or a skin on top of those. GNOME especially expects a system to be set up in a more standard fashion, so distros have less flexability to pointlessly diverge in ways that break apps. Most gui apps are possible to flatpak, and run on almost any distro that is near standard (sorry for your systems which youve made difficult to support by accidently working at cross purposes to flatpak assumptions, but its hard to maintain compatibility when every computer-toucher wants to be their own ISV). Unfortunately its going to take a long time to convince Shuttleworth and Canonical that they are wasting everyones time with snaps, but Ubuntu isnt as popular as it once was. Its also going to take a long time to convince Debian, Fedora or Arch packagers that they should stop and target flatpak on the Freedesktop runtimes instead. There are a lot of devs who are personally offended by inefficiencies in the design of flatpak that leads to vendoring of libraries and duplication between runtimes, but i dont see any other way, the distro approach of deduplicating libraries creates bugs of its own and is unsustainable labor, the improvements to software build and integration that distro feedback brings to gui devs is probably not worth the effort it takes.
I dont think you are going to have much luck convincing volunteers to not work on what makes them happy, or for any existing distro to jump off a cliff for the good of the community, but you can make them irrelevant by inventing something better that the original gui dev community likes and can make work themselves. You can ask them to join your project if it looks successful and fun
@glyph @cthos @miss_rodent thinking about this more as i read further down the thread that the immutable distros (Silverblue/Bluefin/Bazzite et al) do effectively define am api and runtime by what is in the distro and what is left out. While it is _possible_ to layer on a local filesystem image built out of rpms on top of ostree, nothing can rely on that and its not the primary or expected way to extend the system with more apps, flatpak or stuff installed in your homedir like AppImage or distrobox/toolbox containers are the primary way to add on local software, which is a robust layering.
Petr Viktorin@glyph Now, imagine that we get the One And Only Distro.
Except its gatekeepers decide that this setup is weird and unsupported. You are not allowed to do things this way.
Except its gatekeepers decide that this setup is weird and unsupported. You are not allowed to do things this way.
William Oldwin@cthos @glyph @miss_rodent I very much don't want to run applications packaged by Some Random Person In Kansas. I make a deliberate effort to avoid them! I want to run applications packaged by the author/ISV or, failing that, by a team that I can have some trust in to do work of a certain standard. A distribution maintainer team would be the paradigm example of the latter. The 'Snapcrafters' model is maybe borderline.
@cthos Ah, right. Fair enough!