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.
Generally speaking, between flatpaks and appimages, flatpaks are actually a lot easier to make and get out to people. The thing you're talking about here, not being able to easily run or get them, is kinda the core issue with appimages.
I've never actually worked with snaps before, but they're Canonical's format, somewhat? specific to Ubuntu. I can't say too much about them.
I just start AppImages from the command line and put them in my /home/$username/bin that seems to take care of most of the annoying edge cases. Snaps are ridiculously hostile abusing the mount system and polluting all kinds of places where they have no business going, I've completely purged the whole snap subsystem from my machine. Flatpak I've managed to avoid so far.
AppImages are just a portable packaging format while Flatpaks and Snaps also offer sandboxing, and Flatpak is more distro-independent than Snap which is developed by Canonical. Ubuntu used to be extremely pushy about Snap which turned me off and now Flatpak just seems a lot more popular.
Ubuntu is still pushing snap - they still kept the practice of silently replacing apt packages with snaps, I think the default Firefox is still a snap, and so is node.
I'd love to see snap go the way of upstart...
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.
This is definitely a rant, albeit a derserve 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
There are a bunch of different ways it can be addressed. The biggest overarching problem is package managers, essentially. I think immutable distros will do us all a lot of good, but, really all that is needed is just for particular distributions to gain critical mass as has been happening with Arch over the last few years.
As far as actually shipping anything goes, it really is terrible for the user the most. Those are the people that end up getting hurt by not being able to navigate package management systems effectively, or break them, etc, and sometimes you might end up helping someone on a system with a package manager you've never used. let alone actually shipping something through one or any of them. But just because someone inside the Ubuntu or Fedora community might be willing to help by way of packaging one's application doesn't necessarily mean those roles existing is helpful in this era to begin with.
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.
This is a mass of words to say nothing useful. Why is it on the front page?
For some reason it was hard to read and comprehend.
12 minute read without a clear indication of what it’s about. No thanks.
Anything to fight the fragmentation that is for developers on Linux would be great. Packaging and wayland...
That would require GNU/Linux distros to un-GNU themselves or even almost all Linux software un-everthing. The current Linux desktop architecture is built upon everybody compiling stuff per distro and per version. Everything is built on the assumption that "some people" will choose a subset of packages and versions and curate and do the work again and again to obtain binaries that can only work with that specific curation.
I think it is practically impossible to fix Linux desktop without reinventing it under a single entity like AOSP or BSDs.
We need to make a new, better, non-fragmented version of Linux. /s
This is why I never go on vacation to South Beach Miami.
> I'd like for it to.
…
> 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
---
Ha, if the author hadn't mentioned that he was in South Beach on vacation, these lines would still make me think, "Here's a guy who sounds like he's in South Beach but is definitely not from Miami!
With your romantic partner, I assume, as the author mentioned for no apparent reason.
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.
This happens at all kinds of scales throughout the community. The worst part ultimately is how many new users/devs get ran off because of this sort of thing in every nook and cranny of it.
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.
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.
I used that as an example, but, it really isn't the main point of the article. Basically, immutable distros are actually pretty good and worth using. I think that's largely where we'll end up due to all the various terrible user experiences I've seen throughout my years in the Linux community.
appimages are also immutable
Wow, what word salad.
What is this even trying to say?
Imo somebody decided to write a stream-of-consciousness blogpost, and then somebody else posted it here without context.
The topic's interesting and worth discussing, and like many HN posts, the gold seems to be in the comments, so I would be sad to see it removed.
I gave up after about a 1/4 It didnt seem to be going anywhere. Is it a shaggy dog story? I didn’t read the punchline.
tl;dr - package manager bad, immutable distro good
Tldr: some dude venting, hope he feels better now.
>As a software engineer, the most important thing in the universe is your ability to actually get people to experience your work.
lol
I think what you're quoting is one of the clearest and most relatable statements in this whole mess of a blog post!
While I don't relate, I am inclined to agree with you here. I stopped reading at:
> Period.
The only part that actually makes sense.
I want to get background of gabe throwing money to flatpak, no any mention in this article
> I want to get background of gabe throwing money to flatpak, no any mention in this article
This comment needs to be upvoted - the author supports their argument using as evidence a fact I cannot find anywhere on the net.
It's in their title, it's in their conclusion, but it seems to be hallucinated.
Well, it sounds pretty funny.
What can be said factually is that the Steam Deck is based on an immutable distro like Bazzite, which is a lot more important than flatpaks themselves. Flats are just a popular way to get apps on such a setup. I see a lot of resistance to them in general, not just in specific individuals or communities on the web, and they're actually pretty solid and do see lots of investment from other companies. SteamOS itself being an immutable distro, Gabe is indeed at least indirectly shitting his yacht money into them.
Yeah, but shitting and yachts, brah!