This is inspired by a Luke Smith rant about univseral app formats
Where Luke was Right
- Univseral app formats are another thing that needs to be automated/managed
- It easier for devs to bundle in outdated dedpenancies
Sandboxing Isn’t Perfect
- It easier for devs to bundle in outdated dedpenancies
- Flatseel is a tool that can help manage permissions for Flatpaks
- Snaps can be installed in classic mode with no confinent
- Regularly installed packages can also add malware to the user’s home directory
Theming is not Perfect, but it has Gotten Better
- Ubuntu 20.10 will try and detect the theme and use it inside of a snap
- Fedora 33 themes work out of the box with flatpaks
What Luke Missed While he was in the Mandela Effect Universe Where Univseral Apps didn’t Exist
- Snaps mount squashfs filesystems for each app that ruins lsblk and creates slow startup times
- Appimage has no repository system so updates have to be installed manually
Who are they for?
Univseral app formats are targeted third party Developers
- Developers want target for Linux not multiple slightly different distors
- Each distro has different dedpenancy versions that could be incompatible each other
- Each distro has different upgrade cycles that could randomly break things
- Different distors have different names for different libraries
- Different Distros have minor differences for things like /etc/os-release that are a pain to code around.
- Each Distro has their own bearucracy that developers would have to interact with in order to get their packages in that distro’s main respository
- Developers and users are becoming acustomed rolling application updates that devlopers can push straight to users
- All this for a platform that has somewhere between 1 to 3 percent marketshare so they don’t have the insentive to do so since it is small minoirty of users
Brainlets who don’t/can’t use Arch and have the AUR
- The AUR is amazing and has a ton of great softare in it but most distors don’t have anything like it
- Rolling releases are not for everyone especially people in corperate environments
- I am too lazy to install Arch and learn the minor differences of anther linux distro
- Companies and most users are not comforable with rolling release operating systems since they have been subject windows updates and other terrible non free software vendors for decdaes
- Maintaining something like Arch that requires constant updates which can be a problem when managing a fleet of Linux boxes
Dedpenancies have gotten better on Snaps and Flatpaks
- Appimage doesn’t have support Dedpenancies and probably never will because it just shoves everything in one binary
- Snaps and flatpak have the ability install dedpenancies and entire frameworks like gtk and qt
Yes People actually use Fedora and here is why
- Fedora uses DNF which covers the main repos and the
- Implments new technolgies quickly
- Fedora provides software that is more up to date than CentOS and Debian
- Fedora integrates really well with redhat tools like Freeipa and Cockpit
- There is a rolling release called Fedora Rawhide