GabeN Is Shitting Yacht Money into Flatpak and You're Still Arguing Init Systems

hyperionultra

For some reason it was hard to read and comprehend.

cwel

>As a software engineer, the most important thing in the universe is your ability to actually get people to experience your work. lol

FloatArtifact

Anything to fight the fragmentation that is for developers on Linux would be great. Packaging and wayland...

IshKebab

This post is extremely verbose, unjustifiably angry and doesn't even talk about the title. I read half of it and I wish I hadn't bothered.

ThePowerOfFuet

Wow, what word salad. What is this even trying to say?

modeless

I am actually interested in an explainer of the technical differences between AppImage and Flatpak and Snap and why one is better than the others, but I didn't find it here. Personally as a user I have found AppImages annoying as there's no install process to get a binary in your PATH and an app launcher icon automatically, and updating them is a manual process usually, and also I always get this FUSE error that I have to google how to fix. Snaps I have found annoying as the applications packaged that way seem to have limitations that the non-snap versions don't have. Flatpak I have no experience with. All that said, I like the idea of an app being a single file, and if they just provided a standard way for AppImages to register with app launchers and your PATH on first launch, and made them update themselves automatically in a way as seamless as Chrome, and fixed that damn FUSE error, then I'd prefer them.

ilsubyeega

I want to get background of gabe throwing money to flatpak, no any mention in this article

ANarrativeApe

This is why I never go on vacation to South Beach Miami.

feisty0630

While TFA is a bit of a disorganised stream of consciousness, I can definitely empathise with the author on the majority of their points. The desktop Linux community is full of people that are, frankly, completely insufferable. This isn't even isolated to the online world. I still remember when I presented my Honours project for University and the "demo" consisted of a few Debian VMs running on my laptop to serve as a facsimile of a compute cluster. An attendee (a respected industry representative) openly and publicly mocked me for not using RHEL or CentOS - despite the fact I'd already explained the implementation was distro-independent. There's a degree of smug arrogance that's quite pervasive in tech fields, but the desktop Linux community seems to be an outlier even among that. I'm unsure how much of it is lack of social awareness, or neurodivergence, or what, but it's exhausting and it's a big reason why I (also a desktop Linux user) don't really engage in those communities.

muppetman

This is a mass of words to say nothing useful. Why is it on the front page?

gostsamo

What I got is that the author is the right kind of developer, talented, producing something, and serving the people, and some other people in the linux community are trying to dim the shine of his light. The key sentence from the piece is: > Freedom from the tyranny of package managers is the most exciting thing I've ever heard of as a developer. The rest are a few shits and no init system beyond the title. I'm not here to make value judgements lacking even a pony in the race, but the author could've been much more coherent without losing retorical strength. Also, maybe he should consider if his use case is the only use case, but that is going too far.

j3th9n

Tldr: some dude venting, hope he feels better now.

torginus

Finally - I think the biggest issue of Linux today is the inability to ship a binary and have it just work across distros. While there was - an unfortunately failed - push for having ABI compatibility (remember Linux Standard Base?), this has been an issue since Linux has existed And in customary Linux fashion we had 3 solutions for this in Linux-land, snap which was the ubuntu solution that was slow and buggy - and forced on users in a customary ubuntu fashion way before it was ready, AppImage, which was very rudimentary and involved shipping half the userland, and Flatpak, which seemed to be the best engineered (but far from flawless) of the 3. And in customary Linux fashion, users decided to just wait this one out. I think it's great that Valve has taken the time and money to get Flatpak across the finish line. Btw another thing about Valve - it's really great that they could've went their own way and reimplemented huge chunks of the Linux stack rather than going with what's there, and the associated communities and politics (I'm mainly referring to Wayland, and now Flatpak), but they've decided to go for the popular move and actually bring the existing infrastructure up to a commercial standard.

ohelm

An incredible amount of words used to touch on a very complex and deep problem in a very shallow way. Purpoting centralisation and hailing it as the resolution of a very legitimate fundamental need, that of freedom, is difficult to follow. Freedom is not, has never been and will never be easy and comfortable.

bitterblotter

This is definitely a rant, albeit a derserved one. I've never attempted to distribute software to Linux. The mere thought of all the distros and package managers always kill any intention I had to do so. That said, the future seems very bright

andOlga

Wayland, Flatpak and Gnome are dead set on trying to turn my computer into a weird oversized smartphone. AppImage tries to recreate the "just download it and run" experience that Windows and macOS have, but hasn't quite gotten there yet (AppImages will sometimes just randomly link to system-wide libraries anyway, forgetting to bundle dependencies). Meh. I guess I'll check back in some years, as it always goes.

splitbrainhack

learn to blog , worthlessly painful wall of text

dang

Probably (or at least usually) there is a sentence or phrase in the text which represents what the article is actually saying. I tried to find it so we could use it as the title per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , but failed. Anybody?

elcdodedocle

I understand the frustration. I have the uttermost reverence for distro maintainers and I love distro repos. I like that my OS is a consistent and well thought suite of aligned tools mindfully put together by a collective that knows what they are doing and test that it all fits and plays nice much better than I do. Please stop treating these awesome people like some kind of authoritarian ogres. I am grateful for flatpaks too. I understand that tools seldomly need to be tightly coupled to work together well, and that it does come at a cost, just as sandboxing does. I respect developers who do not package anything else. When I need a flatpak, I install it. Finally, it is also amazing that we have AppImages. Some tools just work perfectly well or well enough with limited integration capabilities in multiple diverse ecosystems. Why does everything have to be installable? So, if I want to use a tool I will get it however the developer decided to distribute it, trust that they have a good reason to do it the way they do it, and if I open my mouth it will be to say thanks, instead of being lame about someone's way of putting an effort for me to get a great product without asking for anything in return not being what I think most convenient. For me.