3 ms·
I appreciate the really in depth reply; however, they truly do sound similar if Flatpak was the only package manager installed in the OS. The PopOS! distro is l
by Apofis 5y ago
I appreciate the really in depth reply; however, they truly do sound similar if Flatpak was the only package manager installed in the OS. The PopOS! distro is like this and is working on relying more on Flatpak than Apt, for example.
- lproven 5y agoI am aware; I wrote this last month: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/16/pop_os_2110_new_system76/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/16/pop_os_2110_new_syste... I think you're missing the point here. It's not "apps are packaged with all their dependencies inside a private directory hierarchy". That is true of both, yes. But it is also true of Canonical's Snap format, and 0install, and of AppImage, and of NeXTstep & Mac OS X's .app bundles. In other words, it is far from unique. The real difference with Gobo is twofold: • Most of the others preserve significant elements of the traditional xNix directory layout. macOS in the main OS if not inside the bundles; Flatpak and Snap inside the apps; and so on. Gobo gets rid of it everywhere, top to bottom, from kernel to text editor. • Flatpak, Snap etc. are just app-packaging systems. Even on OSes which use Flatpak exclusively – and PopOS is a poor example here; better ones are Fedora SilverBlue or EndlessOS, with read-only root filesystems, no package manager at all, and OS updates using `ostree` – the directory layout is conventional. Like macOS, the app directory structure is entirely separate from the OS directory structure. In Gobo they are one and the same. I wrote about that here, and you may find it worth a read: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/nixos_linux_os_design/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/nixos_linux_os_design...