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Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

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Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#111
post #43

Better title: Flatpak is thinking about depending on Systemd > It’s important to note that everything discussed during the talk is planning, and not a single line of code has been written yet

Exactly that - the headline is unsupported by the article, but works very well as clickbait.

They said that in the past about many things too - including KDE.

I remember the old discussions from a few years, aka KDE will not depend on systemd. Back then I predicted it will happen.

Lo and behold - it happened.

Isn't it fascinating how naysayers ended up being right, later down the road? This happens often because they tend to be more critical in their thinking than the three seconds memory folks.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#112
post #3

> The current version of Flatpak will continue to see a ton of improvements, but at the same time, the limits of what can be done with its decades-old design have become harder and harder to work around. As such, they’re also planning for and working on what they call Flatpak Next, or perhaps Flatpak 2.0, which is effectively a rewrite of Flatpak based on what they’ve learned over the years, making use of modern tech…

Flatpak is quite old, even before 2016. Didn't we have klick on KDE too? And even before that ... what was the name, not guix, but like versioned app-dirs everywhere (not GoboLinux, but some other name ... not stow either; I forgot the name, but their idea was basically how each installed program is not only versioned but viewable via a GUI too; I think this must have been around 2006 or something like that).

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#114
post #31

Linux Desktop is starting to smell a lot like Android now judging by how vertically integrated it is becoming. With the push for a permissively-licensed (MIT, BSD etc.) userland and concentration of developers within a small group of companies and orgs sponsored by them, they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode, or stop altogether. (MIT, BSD and other licenses do not ma…

Luckily “Linux desktop” is not a single thing. There are many options to choose from. I’d dial the FUD down just a bit.

The entire problem here is that flatpak is exerting pressure to make it a single thing.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#115

So for us who want to continue distribute across multiple distributions, even those that doesn't run systemd, is there only AppImage remaining now as a truly cross-distribution packaging format?

I'm not sure even that works; does appimage work on musl distros?

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#116
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I install only systemd-appd?

systemd-appd doesn't exist yet.

> systemd-appd doesn't exist yet.

This avoids the question, apparently because the design of this part makes it certain that when it does come into existence, it will depend on the rest of systemd.

The problem with systemd is that it's purposefully designed to be a viral monolith, without this it's got no purpose. We've been with this long enough to pretend otherwise.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#117

As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.

I unironically believe Docker is a great deal of a reason why it has freshly opinionated newcomers.

I don't understand that as you don't usually interact with systemd in a container. If Flatpak does end up depending on systemd, then that'll make Flatpak less useful for containers.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#118
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but people learned from issues that pulseaudio had and then came pipewire. Everyone is happy now. I don't know about the philosophical aspects, but from pure technical point of view systemd brought some order into the mess. Before systemd it seemed like most distros were barely holding together with duct tape. Systemd standardized a lot of things. I am fine with a little bit of controversy if the result is a muc…

> Yes, but people learned from issues that pulseaudio had and then came pipewire. Everyone is happy now. Yes, I'm very happy that it mutes my audio when I accidentally unplug my headphones (something which I never asked for) and then often fails to unmute them when plugging them back in, something which requires digging up alsamixer to fix because pulse/pipeware-based GUI tools are being lied to about the output not…

When it comes to incorrect profiles, I suggest making a pull request to alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf with correct configuration. I had similar issue with my audio interface a couple years ago but it was quickly merged and now it works better than on Windows or macOS.

Before that I did have custom config, it was not that hard to set up, there are great examples and explanations on Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#119
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like wayland? Where none of the desktop environments offer the same feature set. And the more compositors there are the harder it is for apps to use those new protocols, and guaranteeing a ton of bug reports from users using an unsupported compositor. That just hinders Linux desktop app development.

Wayland is different, they pretended nothing except compositing and window positioning matters.

I doubt that. But they clearly thought that people should have a choice. And it is great. But fractured community using different tools for the same task makes slower progress. Each approach has its positives and negatives. I think it is great that we have wayland and systemd. It will eventually lead to something greater in the future.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#120
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode Who is "they" here? There's no value to gain from closing the freedesktop ecosystem: no company has a distribution chokepoint like Google does with Play Store, the overall PC market is in decline and everyone would switch to existing anti-systemd alternatives.

I would imagine Red Hat are pretty close to "they", since they created Systemd and then there was the RHEL redistribution controversy [ https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/14k8jmw/can_someone... ].

I too guess they meant Red Hat. But that move just resulted in really big clients switching to RHEL derivatives like Rocky or Almalinux. Closing systemd would spawn a fork and possibly an specification effort for non-systemd components to join in.
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