Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, for example, it's nice not having to manually fiddle with PHP dependencies etc. when it comes to web servers, but desktop apps are rarely like this. They just have their executable, and seldom require any serious configuration.
Desktop apps can have a crap-ton of dependencies and a finicky requirements around specific versions. That's one of the reasons why "flatsnappimage" stuff got created in the first place — to go around the limitations of Linux distribution package manager dependency management model.
And we do need a better way to deal with this. But the "flatsnappimage" approach is not that, IMVHO, as it's clearly driven by other considerations (like the "we want to have an app store we control" thing mentioned in the article).
But the thing is, in a server context you have developers, sysadmins, and that's kinda it. They can make informed decisions on how to manage stuff, and making it easier for the developers to deploy stuff is a reasonably good strategy.
On the desktop you have app developers, OS maintainers, and users. Users often will not be able to make anywhere near as informed decisions as developers and maintainers. Focusing on developer comfort basically leads to ignoring users' needs (like: "a calculator app should not need a 2.8GiB of stuff just for itself").