Comment by Joel_Mckay
5 hours ago
A lot of mature applications just gave up chasing the bleeding edge, and now only distribute Flatpack/snap/AppImage which is similar to classic exe/DLL ecosystems. A kind of silent tragedy for efficient shared library paradigms.
The hard truth is OSS is often chaotic as there is no authority saying a given API is "good-enough" to version freeze, and it limits how much individuals can integrate without upstream source-tree contiguous-integration at the mercy of 150k devs whims. =3
Given the amount of dependency bullshit I've had to deal with over the years, I'm glad the idea of using shared libraries for everything is dying. I like the core idea of it, but the implementation has never actually Just™ Worked™ in my experience outside of either trivial or curated examples. I guess all those mature applications discovered the same thing.
Flatpacks are great. I've barely ever had a problem with them, and the problems I did have were solvable with a cursory web search. Yes, they take up more space. That's a worthwhile trade-off in exchange for actually working.