@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 

@aura you know that's a pretty good point actually

@domi @asie for me, flatpak is just the second choice if the native package doesn't work. as someone who rices their everything, having something that ignores most env variables and systemwide configs is somewhat useful for those cases, but equally annoying for daily use. but more often than not, the flatpak one doesn't work either (usually for unrelated, unique flatpak reasons)

and all that after I spent many days trying to get into flatpak because I like the idea in theory, and the execution is at least better than canonical's snap… I still can't get myself to like flatpak. It's just too flakey, ironically

@tea @asie

> I want automatic updates for those applications (whenever I decide to run flatpak update) instead of them doing their own update checks and bothering me with popups on startup.

package managers solved this decades ago, though?

"i want automatic updates for those applications (whenever i decide to run {apt update, dnf upgrade, pacman -Syu}) instead of them doing their own update checks and bothering me with popups on startup"

in that regard, flatpak is just another package manager. (yes appimages suck but appimages aren't packages and they don't really have a good way to manage them or integrate them with your system)

> why is barely anyone building .flatpaks for their releases

more effort than just providing sources and letting people / distros build it for themselves? flatpak also forces sandboxing on you so all your dependencies need to be in flatpak as well. (one practical example is the obs studio flatpak not working with blackmagic decklink drivers)

@asie
speaking of Packages:
- Never really built software from source, but every OS should strive to treat it as a first-class feature rather than a nerdy/paranoid detour

- Flatpak works well enough, at the expense of clobbering the user's disk with gobs of redundant libraries

- I've stuck to Debian and derivatives, because it has a good supply of binaries that aren't Flatpaks

- I have a certain respect for the BSDs: because the differences between Free, Net and Open go deeper than "we made our own package format because X Y and Z" or "we use MUSL because it's safer and faster than GNU's C library" (no grudge against people who use and maintain such distros)