Not only does Gnome provide the one true way in software, it also literally supplies me with my emotions. Amazing.
This post makes no sense. He says people are complaining about how hard it is to get some flatpacks to function, therefore they hate the fact that Flatpack is a disruptive new distribution model. What?
I think what he is trying to say is people focus on various weaknesses as if they undermine Flatpak, when choices have been made for solid reasons.
His last part is really referencing how containerization has been really helpful but…
Docker has succeed because it wraps a self contained service so its easy to deploy and ensured repeatability.
When you work in operations you might have 10/100/1000 servers to look after. You lack time to care for each server individually so you do the minimum needed for deployment (e.g. similar to branding a cattle). Docker makes this easier.
However Flatpak hits a big problem, most desktop applications are built on GUI frameworks, many have multiple touch points with a desktop environment.
They aren’t small self contained objects, so by shipping them with all the libraries you would create a huge attack area/security vulnerability.
So Flatpaks wrap all those libraries as seperate dependencies. So installing a Flatpak application often means installing an entire desktop environment (now you have two). This obviously uses more RAM and storage and with everything the application loads its slower and can struggle to integrate with your desktop.
There isn’t a magic fix for this, probably the best solution is for someone to build a tool that can translate a flatpak into a build the big distributions (Arch, Debian, RHEL, Suse & Ubuntu).
