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@anemone @feld @sun i primarily blame debian for this development because they’re so resistant to change

the tools are garbage, the documentation is bad, the contribution workflow is a nightmare. the stable versions are too outdated for desktop users, and the unstable ones break too frequently—which with their tooling means apt trying to remove half the system because it’s the only package manager without a good dependency solver, and debian (along with arch and others) is one of the distros that still doesn’t have automatic staging so the repos are never guaranteed to be in a consistent state.

i think the idea of distro-specific package management is fundamentally a good one. it’s a layer of protection from e.g. supply chain attacks, and—with modern tooling—allows testing not just individual packages but the entire system before pushing updates.

it’s just that most distros are still doing it like it’s 1998 and we’re distributing software on CD-ROMs in an era where thousands of upstream projects have a new release every single week.

and because that clearly isn’t working, we now have flatpak. linux distros are so fucking behind the curve that we’re bundling the entire user space with every single app.