Comment on Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks
fluckx@lemmy.world 1 week agoFlatpaks are more common on the atomic distros I guess?
You also didn’t mention Ubuntu snaps. Which is the greatest horror of them all. I wondered why people kept using firefox since it was so goddamn slow. But it turned out to be a snap which just needed 6+ seconds of initial startup time ( every time there was no active browser ). Switching to a .deb installation made Firefox the snappy ( hah! ) program I expected it to be.
I will never install Ubuntu again unless they completely ditch snaps.
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 1 week ago
Yeah. It feels like the issue is that really solving it is hard work (you can feel, with the proliferation of Linux/Windows runtimes that get downloaded behind the scenes for Steam, how much effort they're continuously putting into releasing new runtimes that make slight adjustments for particular issues), and organizations like Ubuntu are always tempted into these kind of "we'll just set up a simple system that means we don't have to work on it because it'll be solved" approaches.
Honestly I think Linus is being a little over simplistic about how easy it would be to create ABI compatibility in userland. In the kernel it's realistic, but in userland it would be hopeless. But he's not wrong that the current situation, however it arrived, is pretty crappy from a POV of wanting to ship something to people outside of the distro's package management, and IMO none of the solutions that have come along since then are effective at solving the problem.