โAnymoreโ? I havenโt ever owned a Windows machine, and I havenโt used a Windows machine since 2015. I do have to fix a random issue on my wifeโs work laptop about once a month.
I get that there are some things some people canโt do without and which keeps them in Windows: games, and requirements of their business (Word, Excel, PPT), but nothing about Linux has gotten significantly better in recent years. Incrementally, over there past decade, sure, but no big, recent change that might justify the title.
Except in the same way Iโve never needed Windows: in a very specific, individual way.
Coming from someone who just migrated myself and my family within the last year. Flatpaks were a big deal. I get people have their criticisms of it but wow, installing and updating apps is so much easier now compared to when I tried linux last and flatpak is probably the main reason why we are still on Linux today.
As a person who was all in on the AppImage distribution system (vs Flatpaks), Iโm both sad and excited to see how well Flatpaks seem to be working out.
I guess they won that little competition in the end - which seems good, as thereโs now a healthy standard we can focus on.
Itโs genuinely great to now have widely accepted distribution independent packaging standards.
Iโm glad Flatpack appears to be winning over the utterly horrible Snap, but I still donโt like it. I fear a day when it becomes difficult to get software that isnโt packaged in Flatpack, and I have good reason to: Ruby Gems. Long ago, I was big into Ruby, and was a major contributor (I authored one of the core standard libraries). Gems came along, and I hated them; eventually, for unrelated reasons, I stopped using Ruby altogether, and now when I encounter it, itโs impossible to use anything that doesnโt have Gem woven into it. Consequently, AFAIK, my current system has nothing Ruby installed on it - unless my OS package manager is doing it under the hood.
IMHO, Flatpacks are a really poor work-around for people supporting and using programming languages that donโt build software correctly. Rust and Go do it right: they build stand-alone executables. Flatpack adds literally no value to software built with these. Theyโre not the only languages that do this, but theyโre the ones having their moment; any language that builds stand-alone, statically linked binaries would do.
Iโm with you about AppImage; it would have been a better solution. Any packaging solution requiring extra software to be installed and a service to use is a bad design. Iโd be objecting less if AppImage were emerging as the winner.
Incidentally, this is why Podman is superior to Docker: yes, you still need extra software to be installed, but thereโs no system service with crazy, root-level permissions required to run containers with podman.
