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.
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!