On Mon, 15 Apr 2019 10:39:02 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'First, even Linus Torvalds is tired of the fragmentation in the Linux desktop.'
You say “fragmentation”, I say “competition” and “choice”. People like to say “the market can’t sustain all these choices”, yet the fact that they have persisted all these years, and even continued to thrive, gives the lie to that claim. The laws of economics work, whether you like them or not.
'That makes life harder for developers.'
No it doesn’t. It makes life harder for *proprietary* developers. Developers of Free Software have no trouble: release the source, including the necessary build scripts, and the distro maintainers are able to produce their own packages pretty much automatically, using their own packaging tools. Simple. How do you think a distro like Debian is able to offer something like 50,000 packages in its repositories?
'Torvalds thinks there's been some progress. For software installation, he likes Flatpak.'
Which causes its own headaches. Look at the long discussion starting here <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2019-January/006421.html> about how to manage Fontconfig caches for fonts coming from Flatpak packages -- it’s not a straightforward matter. How do you deal with duplicate fonts coming from different Flatpaks?
His solution? Having a foundation create a common desktop for all Linux distros ...
Ah, the usual solution to having too many standards: create yet another one.