Article discussing the phenomenon of atomic distributions and numerous associated risks and perils for the Linux desktop, including lack of productizatiom, market share, problems with package management, software distribution and would-be software stores, commercial versus community model, trust and security, Google model, major usability regressions over the past decade, fresh fragmentation, monetary factors, bad timing and missing bigger picture, repetition of effort, battle of egos, and still more

Alas, just as we’ve reached some small level of stability, some small level of progress, there’s a good chance all of this effort will have been in vain. What do I mean by this? Well, the Linux world is fragmenting once more, on several levels.

  • Samueru_sama@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    12 hours ago

    AppImages may not run, sometimes due to libc, sometimes due to fuse. Technobabble for the common user.

    The worst part is, the new formats are NOT compatible with the old ones. Of course. So if you want to use snaps or Flatpaks, you must ADD to your operating system. Instead of having just one package manager like zypper or apt, both the command-line utility and the equivalent GUI store, now you have two, maybe three competing software tools. This adds complexity and overhead.

    This is fixed if you package your appimages properly and use the static runtime which was existed for over 3 years already…

    I do that here: https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/Anylinux-AppImages

    Here is GIMP3 packaged on archlinux running on ubuntu 10.04