Linux Package Distribution Model Is Changing

For the longest time every distro packaged and repackaged the exact same software, but we're entering an age where this model is being replaced and that's for the better, allowing this developers to focus on more important problems

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#Linux #Ubuntu #Flatpak #Foss #OpenSource #LinuxDesktop

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[tacocaked]

Glad flatpak is gaining traction, it's really inefficient to have every distro spend time packaging the same software over and over.

[Linda-]

having a universal packaging format would be a huge step for linux desktop adaption as it would simplify many things and streamline it across different distros

[Kwijibob]

Containerization makes the most sense for desktop and web apps since they rarely integrate with the system and may have conflicting dependencies for the latest versions.

[tireseas]

"Isn't it lazy?" Well yeah, if you ever meet a programmer or sysadmin who isn't lazy they probably aren't great at their job.

[BrazenNL]

I've always wondered why this wouldn't happen. Every time someone tries something, Joe Blow that doesn't put any money on the table, chest thumping that he doesn't want to pay for software, starts complaining like a madman on any outlet that will take them. I think it's a good thing. Have people concentrate on the fun stuff.

[act..]

As long as a flatpak will do everything that a repo package does, then I'm all for it. If you are having to pay people to get work done, you don't want to have them working on menial tasks. Ask any boss and he will tell you, LABOR is the biggest cost of running a business. Around these parts, we tend to like free software, so cost cutting is a big deal.

[cfcf]

It pains me that people argue about distro packaging, flatpaks, snaps and even appimages while Nix is a thing (talking about the package manager, not NixOS).

It's a genius approach to package management. It blows every other package manager out of the water in the amount of packages available, you can have multiple versions living alongside each other, it's distro independent, you don't need to download a 1000mb runtime for a calculator, you can compile your stuff from source...

Flatpak might have the benefit of sandboxing, but the fact that it doesn't atleast get brought up in these discussions is beyond me.

[tassaron]

I've used flatpaks for a few years now for most of my daily apps. They have a lot of potential and I'd love a future Linux desktop where apps can all have permissions managed in a central settings app. Installing and managing apps is one of the most confusing things for average users IMO, something like Flatpak makes Linux easier to recommend to less nerdy friends :)

[mskiptr]

You can generate DEBs and RPMs from GNU Guix package definitions. Why people might not want to do that? Because these packages won't follow the way Debian | RHEL | whatever wants its software to be packaged.

Packaging stuff is basically the whole point of a distribution. Yes, some distros are only focused on the base operating system infrastructure and are a-ok with apps being delivered via Flatpaks. That doesn't mean every distro should be like this tho

[clocked]

I never really saw the value of flatpaks until I got a steamdeck. Same with using docker/podman containers on desktop distributions and not just servers.

Now I'm genuinely considering using an immutable distro to manage the system and doing the bulk of my work within containers and flatpaks. That, or NixOS. It's a tough call.


Meme idea: UNHOLY usage of Linux From Scratch as an immutable distro

[Omnifarious]

I largely agree.

One concern I have... In their attempt to make sure every distribution looks the same and to protect the OS from the application, flatpak used to (and may still, I haven't checked for awhile) make sure /bin and /use/bin were standardized and minimal.

I tried using the PyCharm flatpak. I then discovered that I could no longer use certain tools (like Mercurial) that I'd installed on my system through the distribution package manager.

This model appears to work poorly for handling systems of end-user applications that depend on each other. For Libre Office, this mostly isn't a problem (at least, not for me) but for just about any serious development tool, it very definitely _is_ a problem.

Another problem this creates is a monoculture problem that makes it much easier to target certain commonly used programs with certain kinds of exploits. When you know the exact binary being used, it's much easier to turn a buffer overflow into a usable and broadly applicable exploit.

[thetechguychannel]

The problem here is that it's going to become harder to find some packages in official repositories without having to install some "muh (just imagine someone jumping up and down with mouth agape in excitement) runtime that occupies overhead I probably don't want to include in my system. On one hand, I could just move to Gentoo and compile everything from source, but that is definitely not a trivial way to daily drive a system.

There are better ways to automate deployment to multiple distributions than working with containerization. In fact, many of us have developed ways to do that. The reason why those ways have not been adopted is indeed a level of laziness that has brought us to a present where we have to buy more expensive hardware just to run the exact same software we used to run on top of 3-4 GB of DDR2 memory. Not everyone is incredibly attached to consoomer culture to just shovel out their old system and replace it with a new one every time some application decides to go "shiny, " abandoning a perfectly functional GUI for some matte minimalistic (and frankly cool) look that occupies WAY more memory than it really has any right to. Not everyone can afford to buy these new systems every few years, either. We're going to have to wake up to the reality that software should not trade away usability for the sake of making development easier.

Maybe we'll reach a point in the near future (hopefully) where those of us who learned to code for machines that operated under constraints retake the reins.

With respect and love,
~ A driver developer

[virkony]

Packages is also about how to fragment/bundle software. And grouping of packages. There is not always 1-to-1 correspondence of open-source product and package. E.g. packaging bundled plugins separately or keeping them in same package with main app. Or collect multiple products to place in same package.

[thebahua]

Maybe I don't fully comprehend this move, but it looks like a move away from shared libraries, and toward monolithic packages with libraries contained individually within. If that is the case, it looks like it will be colossally expensive to do very simple things on Linux in the future. Pending more information, count me adamantly against it.

[aplanosgc]

When I started using Linux 2 years ago, I saw snap as "that annoying peace of software that I need to use besides apt to get discord and firefox".
Fast forward to now, and I am considering switching to an immutable distro. So yeah, I couldn't agree more with the title.

[logicalfundy]

My biggest concern is putting all of the eggs into one basket. Nothing is more frustrating than being reliant on a single entity and for some reason losing access to their stuff.

[peterjansen]

I switched to Linux for several reasons, among other because Windows was much too slow for me (i5-750 up to 2019) and wasted too much memory (480 GB SSD back then). I am not jumping of joy from containers replacing properly packaged software. The software usually starts (much) slower and wastes (much) more memory, if for no other reason because you have the same dependencies installed multiple times on your system. For me it is a nightmare-scenario, Flatpak replacing properly packaged software.

[bleack]

As someone on the outside of the whole Linux thing because I'm still on windows....it's kind of insane to me that something like flatpack isn't already the standard. I thought that people on Linux liked to optimize things, so why would so many distros waste time doing the same thing when they could be working on far more valuable and important features?

Sometimes Linux has very very odd priorities, but hearing that things are changing in this direction gives me hope that I won't have to deal with Win 11 when Win 10 support ends. Because that's my deadline. Until then I just poke around to see how things are actually going. And this article gives me a lot of hope becuase it's voicing exactly what I've been thinking for a long time

[liorean]

Containerisation on desktop is for many purposes just a worse way of getting the dependency resolution of statically linked binaries without actually linking statically because glibc really isn't static compilation friendly.

[DankMemerMusic]

I can't understand why so many people are okay with putting critical display drivers and gimp in the same place. I don't want to break or clutter my system by installing something like gimp, onlyoffice, or whatever. I don't want to worry if my system will boot after updating (talkin to you arch) I am a silverblue user and I use nix, flatpak, and containers for apps while I just install drivers with rpm-ostree.