this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Honestly my biggest hope is some generally accepted way to install software that is consistent among distros. I'm leaning toward liking flatpak for this currently, but I also like how appimage works too.
It is really close now, close enough I've dropped windows entirely at home, but occasionally there's still something I'll stumble across that officially only has Deb or rpm download options and if I try from my distro package manager it fails for one reason or another and I give up, just skip it, and be disappointed for a bit.
Oh and support from devs of games at least as far to get anti-cheat stuff to work via proton, but I avoid a vast majority of those games even on windows because their anti-cheat can be so system invasive...
Packaging software for linux is an insane problem. All distributions are so similar yet so different, all of these nuisances prevent you from making much assumptions about the host OS which for instance forced flatpak to be basically a generic distro you run apps on. For obvious reasons it's not an ideal situation, memory consumption is bad, performance in various ways is impacted. I believe that the true packaging format will have to cut some corners and be specific by design to smaller set of distributions. Pretty much how snaps are built around Ubuntu, which imo. is a necessary compromise to have something reasonably fast and lightweight.