@toast @asie i don't mind if devs distribute their own apps, but that absolutely shouldn't be the *only* way to get the apps. it's a simple proposition: i don't trust all devs, but i do trust my distro maintainers. apps that assume/require a certain distribution method are apps that i simply will never use. moreover, distribution methods that assume/require everything else to use the same distribution method are going to be similarly problematic. (practical example: obs-studio built by arch doesn't have the twitch/youtube/etc api integration, but obs-studio flatpak doesn't work with blackmagic decklink drivers, but obs-studio-tytan652 in the aur just works.)

the far bigger problem i take with the article, other than the tone being really unpleasant, is that one of its central claims is that increased centralization is a good thing. first of all, it's a complete non-sequitur to why appimage sucks (and it does suck). beyond that, i don't think the historical framing is accurate either -- hostile software is not a thing of the past, "well-paid engineers that act in good faith" aren't the only participants nor are they a guarantee that problems won't occur, and "compilation and distribution [being] more centralized [...] than [they've] ever been" is not an unquestionably good thing. "Towards improvement, towards centralization" sounds like an oxymoron unless you accept that centralization is aligned with improvement, which... there are many reasons *not* to accept that???? when the strawman being constructed is "you're somehow above just using the developer's build of the developer's application they provided to you", as if there aren't *any* valid reasons to take any sort of issue with those builds?

but also the tone, my god:

> The guys out there with big Che Guevara energy are the real ones building and perpetuating a misery machine fueled by your ideology and nothing else. It's a wealth transfer from the hearts and minds of real and talented developers to ideologues at the top of the ecosystem that would rather take value from your work whilst not actually contributing anything and hoping you'll join in singing kumbaya, drinking the kool-aid, and starving to death while you do one of the hardest jobs on earth.

like, hoo boy, for someone complaining about "ideology" this paragraph alone is full of ideology

> This is incontrovertible fact you can only fail to see if, to you, Linux is not the democratization of technology but instead the intimate satisfaction of init scripts sliding up your butthole in just the right way.

which i guess illustrates the fundamental flaw of this whole article, that it complains about one thing but uses it to somehow justify something completely different and unjustifiable. what is "the democratization of technology" to this person? is it "democratization" when all the technology is controlled entirely by whatever gets corporate funding, and anything that isn't valuable to those corporations remains unpaid? should linux be this club run by those "well-paid engineers" they seem so fond of? how is "democratization" compatible with "centralization"?

in conclusion i didn't get anything useful out of reading this article and whatever useful points could have been salvaged from this, i'm sure others have made those points in far more coherent arguments