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Philosophically, it always bugged me that distros were so centrally in control of packaging: app developers are not allowed to package them in the way they see

Philosophically, it always bugged me that distros were so centrally in control of packaging: app developers are not allowed to package them in the way they see fit, which has caused some friction in the past[0]. It seems healthier and more scalable if each developer could package it autonomously without work from the central maintainer group. KDE Project Banana mentions little about packaging, apart from this:[1] > Instead of legacy packages we target modern deployment systems such as flatpak and systemd-sysext I hope they succeed in that respect. Flatpak has the promise of decentralizing distribution. That said, my experience of it so far has been brittle, with things like changing your locale or shell prompt causing your apps to freeze[2]. I hope they make a stable operating system nonetheless, but it is not easy. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768#41408628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768#41408628 [1]: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux [2]: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5564 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5564

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> It seems healthier and more scalable if each developer could package it autonomously without work from the central maintainer group. > Flatpak has the promise of decentralizing distribution. That said, my experience of it so far has been brittle, with things like changing your locale or shell prompt causing your apps to freeze[2]. I hope they make a stable operating system nonetheless, but it is not easy. That's not a coincidence; you just got rid of the pesky maintainers who made sure that the collective system worked, leaving only a bunch of separate apps that are free to do whatever they want. On the same note, this ensures that security updates are decentralized, so instead of running 'apt upgrade' and being done, you get to hope that every dev providing you with packages updates their dependencies (which is also harder because flatpak encourages vendoring as much as possible).

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> It seems healthier and more scalable if each developer could package it autonomously without work from the central maintainer group. > Flatpak has the promise of decentralizing distribution. That said, my experience of it so far has been brittle, with things like changing your locale or shell prompt causing your apps to freeze[2]. I hope they make a stable operating system nonetheless, but it is not easy. That's not a coincidence; you just got rid of the pesky maintainers who made sure that the collective system worked, leaving only a bunch of separate apps that are free to do whatever they want. On the same note, this ensures that security updates are decentralized, so instead of running 'apt upgrade' and being done, you get to hope that every dev providing you with packages updates their dependencies (which is also harder because flatpak encourages vendoring as much as possible).