Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why

On the other hand the developers who rely on your library wont need to waste time trying to play catch up with your breakage so that their programs keep doing the exact same stuff they were already doing and instead their most likely limited time (especially important for FLOSS developers, many of whom do that in their free time) will be instead put into improving what their applications actually does.

In addition, even in the case the applications stop getting developed, they will keep working since their dependencies would not break and other developers can pick them up if needed, even years later. On the other hand having to pick up a project whose dependencies do not even work anymore is much harder.

Let me repeat a message i wrote some time ago here because i really don't think Flatpak is a good solution (note that this isn't issues from some ancient distro, this is from openSUSE Tumbleweed, this is only a few months old):

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Flatpak is awful, i tried installing software from it a few times and not only it always installs a ton of unnecessary stuff (practically an entire distro!) but also the software doesn't integrate seamlessly with the rest of the system. GUI software looks wrong (themes do not apply, font rendering is wrong), command line software doesn't show up in PATH. Example in [0] for the GUI bits (Bless for theme, Notepadqq for font rendering) as well as the disk usage for two simple programs like a hex editor and a text editor.

Even worse, while there is an option to install things in the user's directory only (so i can make a separate user to try some things that i can easily delete later) not everything installs with that options and wants root access to pollute the rest of my system.

Nowadays i simply avoid anything related to flatpak. If something doesn't provide normal binaries and i really want it, i'd rather compile it from source (and if the source language is something exotic or the program needs a ton of dependencies i'd just skip it).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/9tmo26J.png

Could this be solved by smarter layering? I've read that Flatpaks are just container images under the hood and I'm sure many of those share the same base layers.

I know this is a controversial opinion, some would strongly disagree with me, maybe most would consider me downright wrong. But as a system designer I always thoughts (by always, I mean last ~5 years since I've been thinking about this) the misery we experience with C/C++ package management is an OS problem, not a language problem. The fact that some languages roll their own package manager like pip, npm, cargo etc doesn't change this for me at all. pip, npm, cargo are symptoms of OSs failing to ship dependencies in a sane way.

Ultimately I want my software to be shipped by my OS's package manager like pacman, apt, nix, or flatpak etc. The fact that I can go ahead and install dependencies in pip, npm is an implementation detail while I'm working with the code. The entire linux ecosystem should have been designed in the first place like nix, AppImage or flatpak from day 0 and going to the "shared libraries" route was simply a bug. We thought it was ok, but we quickly saw it was not ok and we should have made the observation that it's not working and switched but we didn't. Like nix does, when there are common dependencies between apps you can still optimize and install them once, but each app should define its own dependency and that version alone should be allowed to use so that a library upgrade doesn't break anything.

Unfortunately, package management is an utter mess today and I no longer have any appetite to use things like `pacman` or `apt` unless absolutely necessary. And this is not even just the fault of archlinux or Debian. Case in point, MuseScore (an app I use every day to write music) published MuseScore 4 over MuseScore 3. The fact is, MS 4 is much better than MS 3, but some workflows are different and it's not in complete future parity with MS 3 (some things they decided not to implement). Now, I want to use MS 4 and I do use MS 4 for most things, but for certain things I still absolutely need MS 3. By "absolutely": I mean for some compositions MS 4 is a dealbreaker and MS 3 is the correct tool. But most other compositions MS 4 is the superior and correct tool. But when they published MS 4 pacman immediately made the package `musescore` point MS 4 with no option to install MS 3. They're two entirely different apps. Solution? Just download the .AppImage from website and call it a day. It would have been much better if `pacman` serves MS4.pacman_exe and I click on it and it opens MS4. Then, it also optionally serves MS3.pacman_exe, I click on it and that also works. If I desire I click on MS3.6.2.alpha43432.pacman_exe and use that specific version, with every library fixed. But this is currently impossible since each version can potentially need different dependencies etc so .AppImage is the only way.

there are no leaders, nobody own the "linux desktop"

this is like systemd, bunch of people enforce poorly designed product on everyone

linux is becoming a windows bis, and this piss me off