Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

Silverblue doesn't get a lot of press but it makes a really solid desktop OS.

As someone who does this for a lot of distros (ZeroTier), I can say that it is hell and I understand why devs don't want to do it.

Two specific examples:

(1) For some reason a lot of Debian distros decided to rename and/or re-version-number OpenSSL for no good reason (pedantry is not a good reason), meaning if you depend on OpenSSL/libcrypto your packages will mysteriously break all over the place because you're not using the versioning scheme or naming convention. We're not doing it now but we may switch to statically linking this.

(2) We use a UPnP library called miniupnp in the current version. We have to statically link it because of issues like (1) and also because some distros were for a time stuck on a version that had security bugs that they would not upgrade because it would break other packages.

So imagine (1) and (2) ad infinitum times a hundred little distributions and Debian forks and... it's completely untenable. Static linking solves many of the problems but that defeats some of the purpose of package management.

We do it for all the major Debian and Ubuntu distributions by using a qemu-chroot based build farm that builds on each distribution+architecture combo with actual qemu binary emulation. It's over 200 gigabytes of chroots and takes two hours on a 64-core Threadripper to build all the artifacts. We tried cross compilation and had too many problems: it builds fine, seems to run fine, then users complain that some mysterious glibc symbol was missing on their system. We switched to building on actual chroots and most of those problems went away. Most of them.

Snap, FlatPak, and Docker are all variations on the same basic conclusion that many developers reached long ago: "fuck it, just distribute software in the form of tarballs of entire Linux installs."

The only thing worse is Windows MSI installers and Windows drivers, though with those at least there's less platform variation so once you battle those horrors the result mostly works on most systems. Mostly. But whoo boy is the Windows installer system horrific. I shall quote Pinhead: "I have such sights to show you..."

Apple is the easiest because they have less legacy baggage than Windows and only one "distribution." They do have some horrors around signing and notarization and we don't distribute in the Mac App Store (yet?).

A major reason SaaS delivered through browsers is eating the world is the immense and totally unnecessary pain of distributing apps for major OSes. Even Apple is quite a bit harder than making a web site that you visit in a browser. All this pain is 100% the fault of OSes not caring about developer experience and in the case of Linux the multiplication of endless "vanity distributions" to no benefit to the community.

If you want packages instead of tarballs of OSes, Linux distributions could (1) consolidate and (2) invest some time in the very boring totally un-sexy work of massive amounts of clean-up and standardizing things as much as possible. But it's more fun to make another vanity distribution I guess. You'll get it right this time and everyone will switch to your distribution.

Mac and iPhone apps don’t automatically update unless you tell them to.

The goal of systemd is to make everyone do everything the way Lennart Poettering likes it on his personal laptop. Perhaps some of it is nice but also some of it is not nice. And his holier and smarter than thou attitude is off putting and rightly so.

And don’t handwave away wasting my resources just so you can avoid work. That’s how we end up with Microsoft Teams.

The last app image I've installed took 800 MB. It was approximately 720 MB of libraries, and just 80 MB of core program. Using self-contained images is simply not scalable.

I have some experience with packaging, and if we talk about standalone applications, dependencies aren't a big deal; producing deb packages for different targets is not difficult. The last (only) breaking change across different targets I can remember was old graphic libraries (I think it was gtk2-based WxWidgets, removed in newer Ubuntu versions).

The one advantage Flatpak provides for me over Nix is containerisation. Not the bullet-proof kind, which allows you to run malware, but of the "reasonable" kind, which stops apps from storing to any directory they like just like that (only chroot level of "security"/isolation would be fine for me).

When there's a package manager / runtime that does both then I'm extremely interested.