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No amount of inventing new formats and technologies will solve any major problem under Linux because the ecosystem is not developed by a single vendor. Any solu

No amount of inventing new formats and technologies will solve any major problem under Linux because the ecosystem is not developed by a single vendor. Any solution will not be uniformly adopted and there will be multiple competing solutions, lacking various levels of polish. Also the money under Linux is with servers, so unless that changes, the desktop landscape is never going to approach MacOS or iOS cohesiveness. Too many ideas, too many projects and efforts, too little top-level organisation and too little time or monetary interest for consumer desktop solutions, especially by the largest players who're all focused on the server and cloud and any benefit for the desktop is incidental.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
That's not very useful way of thinking. .deb packages format for example are quite uniformly established and provide a lot of interfunctionality on many different systems. Of course you are going to find other obscure systems and even big other ecosystems (RedHat obviously, and derivatives), but the format we are looking for doesn't have to be the single one either. It just has to work well enough and be somewhat universal. .Deb-level of universality would suffice just fine.
- curt15 6y ago
  .deb is a format in the same way that .tar.gz is a format. If Fedora or Arch used .deb the problem would no better because each distro has its own package names, its own package versions, and its own downstream patches.
curt15 6y ago
Another way of saying this is that flatpak and snap try to solve what's ultimately a social or policy problem by technical means. Building an abstraction layer like flatpak does necessarily entails a lot of complexity for at best a 90-percent solution; for instance, you still have to worry about what version of flatpak or xdg-desktop-portal each distribution has.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Speaking as a user, not a dev, I don't really understand what you are referring to. There are "multiple" solutions, namely 2 (two). Both of them work on all distros, so I could not care less which one you pick. Same for desktops, again there are two: gtk-whatever and qt-whatever. All software works on both of them, so again I don't care. Same for installing software. Installing Wolfram Mathematica is literally downloading one file, clicking on it and pressing Enter a few times. If anything iOS and its appstore showed that the repo model is great and there is a reason why microsoft developed/copied "winget".
- salawat 6y ago
  As a user, you're missing details, and completely misunderstand several abstractions. For instance, gtk and qt are not desktops. They're ui toolkits. Bunches of widgets that can be composed to cobble together a UI. That's completely separate from the topic under discussion, which is mode of application delivery. FlatPak involves using namespacing and containers to "spin up" a virtual system with only visibility into those slices of the overall host needed to run the program. This is good because it at least keeps unfamiliar software constrained somewhere predictable, but poor because often it won't use OS host libraries, which are generally kept the most up to date, and worst of all, enforces a complexity and debuggability tax where one has to have an intimate understanding of what is going on "in the box" if something goes wrong. Other ways mentioned are the distro model, whereby distributions maintain repository ecosystems and make decisions with regard to FHS compliance, system tooling, update pipeline, etc..., and use those to support their user base. There is the original "compile and stage it yourself" crowd, who basically concentrate on reproducible build capabilities, but tend to lack in automatic dependency resolution. There's the Mac way, which isn't terrible. It tracks and designates places for libraries, Frameworks, and Applications, and has a lot of automated and well integrated ui-tooling which makes the user experience of software install easy, but it's just another paradigm you have to track when trying to write portable software. There's static linking, which delivers executables that are entirely self-contained, but tend to be bigger memory footprint-wise, each have an upgrade path separate from every other executable, and benefit not at all from dynamic linked libraries on the host system. Then finally, there is dynamically linked executables. They're small, commonly reused code is loaded once in memory you have the additional complexity of the linker to be aware of, but you can update the entire system's audience of a particular library at the same time... Which can be a double-edged sword given how the maintainer scripts the install or sets up their system/build environment. Personally, I just sidestep the issue myself by digging into and learning about software I use on a regular basis with disassembly tools, and treat all of my systems the way a good farmer treats their livestock. Distant reverence, but with a careful eye as to whether there is something wrong, and a hard fought for willingness to kill something and start from scratch. It's the only way I've found to be truly safe and resilient in an environment where everyone optimizes for their own particular definition of convenience. (My definition of convenience is a minimum difficulty in troubleshooting what might be wrong, so I favor fewer abstractions as that entails less Tower of Babel to wade through). Full disclosure: my approach generally would classify me as a bit of a curmudgeon in the industry as I still approach computers as being analogs of physical machines. There is a healthy corpus that revels in abstraction, but I'm not really one of them. I like to have a ballpark understanding of what the artfully arranged beach sand is doing. Adding more abstractions or having the computer do things itself is generally not something I strive toward as it almost always comes with an unacceptable increase in the overall complexity inherent to navigating the Gulf between how I and everyone else thinks the system works and how it actually does. More than anything else, in my experience, keeping that Gulf small leads to better overall satisfaction from a lay User. YMMV.
qwerty456127 6y ago
That's subjective. IMHO the Linux UX (including both usability and aesthetics) has been improving steadily during the last 20 years as I've observed it. And the only reason I use Linux (Manjaro with KDE Plasma) is my experience is "like Mac but better" (perhaps it's worse in some aspects I don't know).
- Santosh83 6y ago
  True, as a long time Linux user, it is true that the ergonomics and state of the art has steadily improved, but its competitors on the desktop have also been steadily improving all the while, and they had a considerable head start, so Linux sadly always tends to be almost there but not quite. That is why Canonical expressly targeting user desktops when they started out was a watershed moment, but sadly, that did not sustain because of failed monetisation.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Many people seem to moan that Windows 7 is still the best Windows and that macOS has been on a downward trajectory since Snow Leopard, or whatever. Is it so obvious that other OSs are actually advancing and leaving Linux in the dust? For example I don’t find Windows new app packaging and sandboxing (Store apps) to be much of an improvement over anything.
  - pxc 6y ago
    Could you outline some of these improvements? I mostly stopped using other operating systems a long time ago, so my impressions of them are partially ouit of date, but for my previous job I had to use a Mac for development, and lately I'm experimenting with Windows in some virtual machines in order to automate the setup of certain tools for Windows developers. In neither case have I seen some desktop environment feature and thought ‘Wow, I wish I had something like that on Linux!’.
zokier 6y ago
Linux is not an operating system or a platform, it's a kernel. Ubuntu, RHEL, Suse etc are operating systems, but more importantly they are separate independent operating systems. Their interoperability pretty much starts and ends with POSIX, everything else being more of a happy coincidence. And many of those major Linux-based OSs have strong vendor behind them. Same way you don't expect cohesiveness between macOS and Windows, I think it is bit unreasonable to expect cohesiveness between RHEL and Ubuntu or whatever.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  POSIX had a patch update 3 years ago, a minor update 12 years ago, and a major update 19 years ago. That's the problem. The desktop distros could and should have done a lot better to coordinate on fundamentals of user experience in the age of the open/hostile Internet and frequently updated software.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    POSIX does not know much about desktops really. If you want coordination in fundamentals of desktops, look at Freedesktop specs https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Thanks for the referral! Unfortunately the website isn't loading for me. Wikipedia shows their projects seem to be focused on lower level graphics/UI issues, but not app packaging and security issues that have become very important in past 10 years.
      - the_why_of_y 6y ago
        FlatPak was freedesktop.org's app packaging and security project for a couple years, when it was still called xdg-app. It's hosted on github today. https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/24/xdg-app-moving-to-freedesktop-org/ https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/24/xdg-app-moving-to-f... https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Flatpak/ https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Flatpak/

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

That's not very useful way of thinking. .deb packages format for example are quite uniformly established and provide a lot of interfunctionality on many different systems. Of course you are going to find other obscure systems and even big other ecosystems (RedHat obviously, and derivatives), but the format we are looking for doesn't have to be the single one either. It just has to work well enough and be somewhat universal. .Deb-level of universality would suffice just fine.

curt15 6y ago
.deb is a format in the same way that .tar.gz is a format. If Fedora or Arch used .deb the problem would no better because each distro has its own package names, its own package versions, and its own downstream patches.

curt15 6y ago

Another way of saying this is that flatpak and snap try to solve what's ultimately a social or policy problem by technical means. Building an abstraction layer like flatpak does necessarily entails a lot of complexity for at best a 90-percent solution; for instance, you still have to worry about what version of flatpak or xdg-desktop-portal each distribution has.

diffeomorphism 6y ago

Speaking as a user, not a dev, I don't really understand what you are referring to. There are "multiple" solutions, namely 2 (two). Both of them work on all distros, so I could not care less which one you pick. Same for desktops, again there are two: gtk-whatever and qt-whatever. All software works on both of them, so again I don't care. Same for installing software. Installing Wolfram Mathematica is literally downloading one file, clicking on it and pressing Enter a few times. If anything iOS and its appstore showed that the repo model is great and there is a reason why microsoft developed/copied "winget".

salawat 6y ago
As a user, you're missing details, and completely misunderstand several abstractions. For instance, gtk and qt are not desktops. They're ui toolkits. Bunches of widgets that can be composed to cobble together a UI. That's completely separate from the topic under discussion, which is mode of application delivery. FlatPak involves using namespacing and containers to "spin up" a virtual system with only visibility into those slices of the overall host needed to run the program. This is good because it at least keeps unfamiliar software constrained somewhere predictable, but poor because often it won't use OS host libraries, which are generally kept the most up to date, and worst of all, enforces a complexity and debuggability tax where one has to have an intimate understanding of what is going on "in the box" if something goes wrong. Other ways mentioned are the distro model, whereby distributions maintain repository ecosystems and make decisions with regard to FHS compliance, system tooling, update pipeline, etc..., and use those to support their user base. There is the original "compile and stage it yourself" crowd, who basically concentrate on reproducible build capabilities, but tend to lack in automatic dependency resolution. There's the Mac way, which isn't terrible. It tracks and designates places for libraries, Frameworks, and Applications, and has a lot of automated and well integrated ui-tooling which makes the user experience of software install easy, but it's just another paradigm you have to track when trying to write portable software. There's static linking, which delivers executables that are entirely self-contained, but tend to be bigger memory footprint-wise, each have an upgrade path separate from every other executable, and benefit not at all from dynamic linked libraries on the host system. Then finally, there is dynamically linked executables. They're small, commonly reused code is loaded once in memory you have the additional complexity of the linker to be aware of, but you can update the entire system's audience of a particular library at the same time... Which can be a double-edged sword given how the maintainer scripts the install or sets up their system/build environment. Personally, I just sidestep the issue myself by digging into and learning about software I use on a regular basis with disassembly tools, and treat all of my systems the way a good farmer treats their livestock. Distant reverence, but with a careful eye as to whether there is something wrong, and a hard fought for willingness to kill something and start from scratch. It's the only way I've found to be truly safe and resilient in an environment where everyone optimizes for their own particular definition of convenience. (My definition of convenience is a minimum difficulty in troubleshooting what might be wrong, so I favor fewer abstractions as that entails less Tower of Babel to wade through). Full disclosure: my approach generally would classify me as a bit of a curmudgeon in the industry as I still approach computers as being analogs of physical machines. There is a healthy corpus that revels in abstraction, but I'm not really one of them. I like to have a ballpark understanding of what the artfully arranged beach sand is doing. Adding more abstractions or having the computer do things itself is generally not something I strive toward as it almost always comes with an unacceptable increase in the overall complexity inherent to navigating the Gulf between how I and everyone else thinks the system works and how it actually does. More than anything else, in my experience, keeping that Gulf small leads to better overall satisfaction from a lay User. YMMV.

qwerty456127 6y ago

That's subjective. IMHO the Linux UX (including both usability and aesthetics) has been improving steadily during the last 20 years as I've observed it. And the only reason I use Linux (Manjaro with KDE Plasma) is my experience is "like Mac but better" (perhaps it's worse in some aspects I don't know).

Santosh83 6y ago
True, as a long time Linux user, it is true that the ergonomics and state of the art has steadily improved, but its competitors on the desktop have also been steadily improving all the while, and they had a considerable head start, so Linux sadly always tends to be almost there but not quite. That is why Canonical expressly targeting user desktops when they started out was a watershed moment, but sadly, that did not sustain because of failed monetisation.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Many people seem to moan that Windows 7 is still the best Windows and that macOS has been on a downward trajectory since Snow Leopard, or whatever. Is it so obvious that other OSs are actually advancing and leaving Linux in the dust? For example I don’t find Windows new app packaging and sandboxing (Store apps) to be much of an improvement over anything.
- pxc 6y ago
  Could you outline some of these improvements? I mostly stopped using other operating systems a long time ago, so my impressions of them are partially ouit of date, but for my previous job I had to use a Mac for development, and lately I'm experimenting with Windows in some virtual machines in order to automate the setup of certain tools for Windows developers. In neither case have I seen some desktop environment feature and thought ‘Wow, I wish I had something like that on Linux!’.

zokier 6y ago

Linux is not an operating system or a platform, it's a kernel. Ubuntu, RHEL, Suse etc are operating systems, but more importantly they are separate independent operating systems. Their interoperability pretty much starts and ends with POSIX, everything else being more of a happy coincidence. And many of those major Linux-based OSs have strong vendor behind them. Same way you don't expect cohesiveness between macOS and Windows, I think it is bit unreasonable to expect cohesiveness between RHEL and Ubuntu or whatever.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
POSIX had a patch update 3 years ago, a minor update 12 years ago, and a major update 19 years ago. That's the problem. The desktop distros could and should have done a lot better to coordinate on fundamentals of user experience in the age of the open/hostile Internet and frequently updated software.
- viraptor 6y ago
  POSIX does not know much about desktops really. If you want coordination in fundamentals of desktops, look at Freedesktop specs https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Thanks for the referral! Unfortunately the website isn't loading for me. Wikipedia shows their projects seem to be focused on lower level graphics/UI issues, but not app packaging and security issues that have become very important in past 10 years.
    - the_why_of_y 6y ago
      FlatPak was freedesktop.org's app packaging and security project for a couple years, when it was still called xdg-app. It's hosted on github today. https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/24/xdg-app-moving-to-freedesktop-org/ https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/24/xdg-app-moving-to-f... https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Flatpak/ https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Flatpak/