Flatpak is not the future (2021)

At this point, I'm also tired of convincing others that linux package management is broken beyond repair. Until you experience my pain, you won't be convinced. I understand many people will never be able to sympathize with my pain but all I can truthfully and honestly say is that I'm a very experienced GNU/linux user, I used all kinds of distros from Ubuntu to Fedora to Arch to Gentoo and, no, it's all a complete and utter mess when it comes to dependency management. I end up spending hours every month fixing broken versions. The sweet spot is using pacman for very basic things, and AppImage for everything else. I don't care about memory efficiency, I want `MuseScore4.appimage` to contain everything about the app, I want it to behave exactly the same every single time I click on it. No, I don't tolerate even the slightest behavior difference, I do not want glibc to upgrade from x.y.z.t to x.y.z.t+1 because it causes insanity when t+1 causes a behavior change in some random software synthesizer I happen to use. I know that this probably doesn't make sense to 99% of users, but maybe I have a special case. Case in point, in the year 2023 while trying to ship a lot of work I'm producing, a single update broke tons of my workflows, and I finally decided that anything not frozen in AppImage is cursed. If it doesn't work you, I respect your patience and expertise, I just hope some people can understand the pain other users go through.

I have a degree in CS, I write code full time, I manage linux containers in my day job, and I still can't manage the mess I have at home in my local Ubuntu/Arch installs. I don't know how people who don't know how to code do, but all I know is that I'm done spending hours at a time on fixing glibc at this point. I just want to work on my hobbies, thank you very much.

EDIT: And before people come here, no, OSX and Windows are even worse. I won't consider using them either.

I use AppImage for the sort of software that won't get packaged (proprietary or obscure) and zypper for pretty much everything else (excepting a few programs I build myself due to reasons.)

I mean... citation needed :) I run Arch and I am not dismissing at all the frankly incredible work that the Arch maintainers do bundling software and making it available. It is a miracle that it works as well as it does, to the point where my Arch systems are often more stable than non-rolling-release distros I occasionally run. Fantastic work by the maintainers.

But it's not a solved problem and I can only imagine how much effort and work is getting burned to keep it running as smoothly as it does. Step outside of the official Arch repos into AUR or (heaven forbid) into completely separate ecosystems and all of those problems come back. And I don't want to ignore the software outside of the repos, I didn't start using Linux so that I would be beholden to some kind of "official" distro app store.

There are tons of Open Source applications with no legal barriers in place that are not getting packaged in official repositories for no other reason than that they're niche and there is a lot of software to package and not enough people to do package it all.

And of course any non-OS games are also going to run into these problems. That's a problem that distro maintainers can't solve, it doesn't matter how much work they put into it, they can't repackage source-available or closed source software. "People shouldn't ship that" -> but they do :) So ideally we'd be able to handle that without descending into dependency hell.

> No, the main reason is that the linux versions do not exist for the most part

I'm not talking about games where the Linux versions don't exist, I'm explaining why I'm currently running the Windows version of Inscryption on my Deck even though it has a native Linux port. Do I want to be doing that? No, of course not. But the Linux version doesn't boot, most likely because there's some dependency chain missing or an environment variable is wrong, or... I don't know, I don't want to crawl through forums and debug that myself, I want to play the game.

And I'm not alone in that, it is common advice on Linux to use Proton instead of Linux native versions. And that stinks, it's bad for the ecosystem and it's bad for users and it's bad for games. But the Linux versions have so many more problems because they make assumptions about the underlying system that turn out not to be true. Of course Windows builds also have those problems, but the difference is that they run in a containerized environment that gives them the system they expect.