The article is speculative and not confirmed. It’s an opinion piece based a conference talk given by 2 software developers.
In a blog post last year, one of the developers from the conference, Sebastian Wick said that they are planning a way for flatpak to be able to communicate with systemd. In another blogpost, it says that they don’t want to make flatpak be dependent on Linux or exclusive to Linux systems. It seems systemd will be optional.
Main gnome devs on Reddit are essentially saying “it sucks to be you” to systemd less distro users.
2 software developers.
Aka most of the flatpak maintainers.
It will just be another situation like userdb or elogind/eudev where this component has to be implemented in other operating systems to be compatible, a big nothing burger.
I dislike Flatpak a lot more than SystemdSame here. Arch + Nix + AppImages + Homebrew + Distrobox and you pretty much have it.
GNOME is the bane of FOSS. Wasn’t flatpak marketed as the universal packaging system?
Why is that Gnome’s fault please explain.
GNOME only knows three things: have a good idea, fuck it up, and ignore community feedback.
When has GNOME ignored community feedback or fucked up any idea?
For lack of community feedback look up Torvalds previous beef with them, them choosing to remove theming. If they finally listened I’m glad, but personally I’ve avoided gnome since their 2011-2013 GNOME 3 actions. I was trying to find a good series of links but I found this article that seems to sum it up well as of recent events.
GNOME Tweaks features are still a separate install.
Torvalds’ “beef” was since 2007 (nearly 20 years ago) and I think he just moved to KDE. Theres a common pattern where user complaints end up somehow becoming objective failures rather than personal preferences.
GNOME also never removed theming. They adopted a platform library for their apps. You can still apply themes to GNOME apps if you want them to match a specific color palette but the app itself isnt going to necessarily match the style of other applications.
If GNOME hadn’t created libadwaita (a platform library on top of GTK), then they would actually be doing what their critics claim and centralize gtk development to just suit GNOME since every feature gnome wants will just be written to gtk rather than separated into its own thing.
GNOME tweaks being separate is not an issue. Its just an app like everything else. GNOME extensions are also just apps. Ive not installed GNOME tweaks since recent versions and its also bundled with some operating systems like Debian (the only thing I really use it for is keyboard remapping for Emacs)
The attached blog is just a unhinged rant. Theres a graph that literally two lines of GNOME vs. “Other” and inappropriate comparisons of the Linux kernel project and the GNOME project which are two very different entities and I assume is only done so that the author can glaze torvalds for being a “chad” or something.
Theres no actual critiques of gnomes design besides pointing out already resolved inconsistencies and how GNOME 2 was so obviously better (it only was because people compared a completed product to a new design).
They could have kept GNOME 2 as a classic mode, and GNOME shell as a new alternative mode.
This literally exists its called GNOME flashback also the Cinnamon desktop. This person is an idiot and the reason why GNOME maintainers are abrasive now.
The fact is that GNOME is the most visible project, the most progressive project and the most successful project and so it attracts flies.
GNOME is the Apple of Linux
GNOME is not the bane of FOSS lol, stop spreading linux chud neckbeard talking points. Flatpak will not depend on systemd it will depend on features that systemd already provides.
If other operating systems without systemd don’t have those features, then flatpak doesn’t work. It’s basic shit that chuds don’t understand because they want their leet setup to work forever and shift the burden onto volunteers to support their legacy system over anything else.
Jorge Castro is telling people to shut the fuck up because they’re just asking unactionable questions and then get mad when they don’t get an answer that they want.
This is just a proposal by some Flatpak developers. The more important thing is that flatpak will have better cgroups integration which will be cool to see (already in progress I think).
some flatpak developers
Not the protocol nak dick that was kicked out of Wayland
i have found actually working with flatpaks to be very tiresome
A match made in hell
Systemd lets me do my fun podman containers so this is cool by me
I’m a flatpak advocate and have been wanting better permission capabilities similar to Android, so I don’t really care how they do it. I’ve never been presented with any reason as to why people dislike systemd other than “Linux is about choice”, when the choices in my eyes are like having 50 cans of the same soup at the store with slightly different ingredients and half of them are expired.
I’ve never been presented with any reason as to why people dislike systemd other than “Linux is about choice”, when the choices in my eyes are like having 50 cans of the same soup at the store with slightly different ingredients and half of them are expired.
My issue with the Linux ecosystem becoming heavily centralized on a few tools that most distros are built on and reducing the modularity of these tools is that it leaves most users vulnerable to attacks on their privacy (and supply chain attacks) and ability to protect themselves from capitalist surveillance when age verification and other dystopian laws take effect, and it becomes more difficult to escape from these dependencies. I also don’t like systemd as much now because of the poor code quality from its heavy use of AI slop.
I get that many tools are reinventing the wheel, and developers’ free time and funding are very limited, though I believe many tools still serve specific purposes better than others, and it’s good to have a backup when one dev team decides to make a controversial, unethical decision that puts users in jeopardy which happens very frequently.
When people say “Linux is about choice”, it does sound idealistic, but honestly I believe they are not wrong to an extent. The Linux ecosystem needs to retain its modularity, otherwise it becomes easier to exploit and enshittify like other corporate proprietary operating systems. I wouldn’t care about this as much if we weren’t under threat of this capitalist dominated world.
I get and agree with the capitalist attack angle. The AI slop code is everywhere, so I don’t think that’s necessarily unique. There’s very few projects with the backbone to say that slop coders will be perma banned from the repos or putting in place more strict controls on contributors.
You highlighted my main problem in the middle though. Lots of Linux users get upset that things are moving to Flatpak instead of keeping to native packages, which makes things significantly easier for developers to not have to worry about the differences in multiple distros. Developers are moving to Wayland because they’re tired of carrying decades of technical debt that isn’t worth it to untangle. For every move like this, there’s users who complain that their ‘choice’ is being taken away when they in reality contribute nothing at all to the ecosystem aside from running it on their computer.
Many of these complaints and efforts are championed by the fascists in the community too, like the Xorg fork, the HHD developer kicked off the Bazzite team for being a transphobe and the CachyOS team refusing to work with Bazzite due to that “drama”, the the Hyprland dev and their dislike of desktop environments, Lunduke and his ilk, the pedophile Stallman evangelists, etc. The list is endless. And not that we should let them ‘win’ and refuse to do good things because they also want it, but it makes me question how much of it is RETVRN type shit but in relation to computers.
That’s why I don’t care at all when developers say stuff like Jorge Castro and go “of course this is happening, deal with it”, because they are doing things that makes their lives easier and I imagine they also don’t want to deal with these same people who insist on sticking to convention and blocking any sort of progress. I strongly appreciate what the Ublue team has done (including Jorge with Bluefin) to make Linux actually usable for the average person and not a nightmare of following guides to find the right package for your very specific problem.
All this makes it very difficult to separate out the legitimate criticisms you’ve brought vs. the nonsense.
I agree with everything you said. We really need more leftists contributing to the Linux and FOSS space and making media content. There’s too many fascists that have a lot of spotlight in the community. I also believe Flatpak can be a really good way to install user software to minimize maintenance issues of native system packages (as well as the benefit of sandboxing applications and restricting permissions), but I’m really disappointed that they are now considering age verification checks.
It does make me feel gross to make valid criticisms of these tools being exploited by capitalists, and it’s muddied by chuds who exclaim “muh freedums” and harass developers who don’t have infinite time to support every system.
Have you tried systemd-nspawn?
No but from like two Google searches it doesn’t seem to be particularly suited to my use case. I’m just running a couple services like a music server and not a particularly advanced user
It’s basically a more systemd-integrated version of docker/podman. I think you could run a container without too much trouble by creating an “OCI bundle” from an existing container image and running that. But you’re right it might be slightly more hassle.
Host independence left chat
