Other Open-Source / Linux Letdowns For 2018 From File Creation Time To Flatpaks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Other Open-Source / Linux Letdowns For 2018 From File Creation Time To Flatpaks

Back on New Year's Eve I shared what I viewed as some of the biggest open-source and Linux letdowns of 2018. Since then via the forum comments and elsewhere some other current shortcomings were also brought up...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=More-Open-Source-Letdowns-2018

[chilek]

while Ubuntu continues pushing Snappy

Didn't they do their homework with Unity vs Gnome?

[froqstar]

> Snappy does have the benefit of having more flagship applications like Spotify being available...

What about this flatpak?

[Guest]

Didn't they do their homework with Unity vs Gnome?

It's better to implement a custom solution only for the least possible number of top layers... And, reuse common layers below, and work together to make them more robust...

For Unity, it's better to just make plugins for gnome and extend layers below if some customization point is missing, or improve performance of layers below... Saves time, makes everybody happy.

Also, for delivering applications, do the same with Flatpak... Just touch top layers, and extend common base to make everybody happy.

[sheepdestroyer]

Didn't they do their homework with Unity vs Gnome?

You forget MIR vs Wayland & Upstart vs Systemd. They love throwing money at toying with their own version of key technologies that they will be using alone for a while. Eventually, after having wasted everybody's time, they will turn to the superior solution that everybody else is already using.

[rukur]

Ubuntu likes pushing and pushing.. Then going we are switching. Be it Unity or snaps. It will be gnome and flatpaks.

[SpyroRyder]

It's better to implement a custom solution only for the least possible number of top layers... And, reuse common layers below, and work together to make them more robust...

For Unity, it's better to just make plugins for gnome and extend layers below if some customization point is missing, or improve performance of layers below... Saves time, makes everybody happy.

Also, for delivering applications, do the same with Flatpak... Just touch top layers, and extend common base to make everybody happy.

To be fair to Canonical for once they had been working on the solutions that turned into Snaps for a long time. They just realised at a point they could make it a more generalised solution. Flatpak/xdg-app as it was known back then, is more limited for the usecases that the original snappy targeted because of the chosen sandboxing methods. However, that doesnt stop Flatpak being a better design for most user-facing software, but similar to Upstart before it, it does exist for a good reason but in the future it may be better to pick up the other solution

[L_A_G]

Not sure if there's much of a point to be going on about a lack of Adobe, AutoDesk and Microsoft software considering that's always been a really irritating "reverse chicken-or-the-egg"-type* problem. In all honesty, as defeatist as it may sound, more effort should probably be put on getting these pieces' Windows versions to run really well under Linux than trying to just get native ports.

*To get these pieces of software requires a lot of users, but to get enough users requires these pieces of software.

[brownsr]

Those interested might like to know that statx is used in the nemo file manager since nemo v4.0, released 1st Nov 18. Linux Mint 19.1 includes these changes to nemo, it was released Dec 19 2018.

(EXT4, without home directory encryption, kernel must support it).

[Ananace]

Snappy seems to have certain advantages when used for it's designed purpose of IoT and cloud applications, for regular desktop usage though it's not really much better or much worse than Flatpak. Though Flatpak did provide a better desktop-environment-abstraction design from the get-go with their portal mechanism, something that Snappy is adding support for to their system as well.

From a not too up-close view - being unable to properly install Snappy on my distribution - Snappy seems to be closer to something that tries to compete with the system package manager, with their use of it for packaging both server daemons and even system components, things that tend to be handled much better by a system with full dependency handling and better low-level interaction capabilities.
Flatpak on the other hand still focuses basically entirely on desktop applications, things that you only ever launch through a menu or other kind of desktop launcher, and that aren't used with the terminal or as services. Instead letting all the more system-near pieces be handled by the system's own package manager.