Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a nice life!
I just bumped into this post while checking my feed https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future
An excerpt:
I just bumped into this post while checking my feed https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future
An excerpt:
The author makes some valid points, and I agree with some of them, specially those regarding flatpak and snaps(haven't used docker or steam). However, I do disagree in others, like his claim thatDeploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux desktop .... The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this.
Not true. Appimages don't require(as in mandatory)any service to be usable. I use 20+ appimages, and I've never had the need for a "special" service, yes, these solutions exist for people that want this to be done "automagically", but you can integrate appimages in your system just as easily, and in fact, most desktop environments provide the means to do so, with one exception(that I know of): Gnome. Maybe that's what the author use, thus his complaint, given he uses fedora which ships with it.All of the desktop integration (launcher entries, mimetypes, icons, updates) is provided by either appimaged or AppImageLauncher, one of which must be installed by the user for any of this to work. So in practice, AppImage is no different than any of our other solutions: it requires a service to be usable. If a user doesn’t have the service, well that’s another hoop they have to jump through to install an app.