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Cake day: August 22nd, 2024

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  • There are other costs, too. Someone has to spend a LOT of time maintaining their repos: testing and reviewing each package, responding to bugs caused by each packaging format’s choice of dependencies, and doing this for multiple branches of supported distro version! Thats a lot of man hours that could still be used for app distribution, but combined could help make even more robust and secure applications than before.

    And, if we’re honest, except for a few outliers like Nix, Gentoo, and a few others, there’s little functional difference to each package format, which simply came to exist to fill the same need before Linux was big enough to establish a “standard”.


    Aaaanyway

    I do think we could have package formats leveraging torrenting more though. It could make updates a bit harder to distribute quickly in theory but nothing fundamentally out of the realm of possibilities. Many distros even use torrents as their primary form of ISO distribution.




  • merthyr1831@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlManjaro on Macbook
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    5 days ago

    Asahi Linux has done great work for compatibility for recent apple hardware. They’ve even gotten some decent Vulkan performance from the GPU despite reverse engineering it from scratch - Apple meanwhile refuses to implement Vulkan in favour of Metal, which makes MacOS less compatible with graphically intensive apps than Linux.

    All praise the queen, Asahi Lina!




  • I know there’s limitations to flatpak and other agnostic app bundling systems but there’s simply far too many resources invested into repacking the same applications across each distro. These costs wouldnt be so bad if more resources were pooled behind a single repository and build system.

    As for using flatpaks at the core of a distro, we know from snaps that it is possible to distribute core OS components/updates via a containerised package format. As far as I know there is no fundamental design flaw that makes flatpak incapable of doing so, rather than the fact it lacks the will of distro maintainers to develop the features in flatpak necessary to support it.

    That being said, it’s far from my point. Even if Alpine, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE etc. all used their native package formats for core OS features and utilities, they could all stand to save a LOT in the costs of maintaining superfluous (and often buggy and outdated) software by deferring to flatpak where possible.

    There needs to be a final push to flatpak adoption the same way we hovered between wayland and xorg for years until we decided that Wayland was most beneficial to the future of Linux. Of course, this meant addressing the flaws of the project, and fixing a LOT of broken functionality, but we’re not closer than ever to dropping xorg.