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Packaging systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, and Snap allow Linux apps to have extensive backward compatibility going forward.
by commoner 5y ago
Packaging systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, and Snap allow Linux apps to have extensive backward compatibility going forward.
- lmm 5y agoMaybe. I don't think the Linux world has made a credible commitment to support all or any of those going forward. In 5 years' time we can try to run 5 year old apps in those formats and see whether they work; I wouldn't bet on it myself.
- commoner 5y agoFlatpak is confirmed to work on 28 Linux distros, and is pre-installed on 9 of them: https://www.flatpak.org/setup https://www.flatpak.org/setup. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is committing to a 10 year support lifecycle for its Flatpak runtimes: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th... AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years. I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.
- lmm 5y agoThe fact that you're mentioning three different systems kind of proves the point - maybe one of them will still be working in 10 years on some distributions, but I wouldn't want to count on all of them working on the distributions that matter in 10 years' time. I'm old enough to remember LSB, which was notionally supported by all the big distros, but turned out to be useless in practice.
- esarbe 5y agoYes. Flatpak is a game-changer.