@asie I'm leaving feeling… neither?

I agree that applications should ultimately be distributed by their developers, and that flatpak is a genuinely good approach for this that has beaten the alternatives (snap, appimage) for good reason. The historical "devs suck at packaging their stuff" remains accurate, but at a small-enough cost we're bypassing this for the most part.

I guess what leaves me feeling off about this is the general perspective; I end up disagreeing with the fundamental premise. Is the primary purpose of a book to be read? A painting to be seen? Should we see creative output as something to be consumed, and therefore whose delivery pipeline must be optimized? Is it a failure to not record a lullaby you sing to your child because you didn't optimize for how many people receive it?

There are many kinds of software, and many ways to see it. The author works on games (well, open source game mods), the most profitable entertainment market in the world, which certainly shifts one's point of view. This tends towards a very supply and demand worldview.

Recently, one of my closest friends decided to switch to linux for gaming purposes again. I recommended an immutable distribution optimized for this (bazzite), and for him to use the store (flatpak) for as much as possible. I considered his use-case and made the suggestion that makes the most sense for it. This is not in conflict with what I do otherwise.

I guess the issue is that the post is a rant towards a specific subsection of people that I am simply not part of (this is fairly obvious given the very first example). It's why it's full of "you, yes you"s. Those just tend to be narrower by definition.