The old model works for established software, but breaks down a little now that it becomes easier to write software applications.
Personally I use my distro packages for foundational stuff (DE, systemd, tools and utilities) but I use an alternative package manager (flatpak) for most other applications.
What Flatpak, Snap and AppImage try to achieve is to limit the packaging burden for both distro maintainers and application developers, so that end-user applications can become immediately available on a wide variety of distros.
That's kinda what the distros ARE. Also, if you're debian based and debian packages are not compatible with your distribution you're actively fucking something up for "reasons" - stop doing that.
If an app can't use a standard .deb or .rpm then the distro is doing something wrong. If dependency version management is too hard, someone is doing something wrong - not sure who, could be a library maintainer or an app maintainter. Let's not ship half an OS with every app to avoid this stuff.
You can't take a "standard" .rpm from the Fedora repositories and install it on CentOS. You can't take a .deb from Debian 11 and install it on Debian 10.
For the base system and libraries, yes. But why should the distro maintainers be burdened with additional work for every possible enduser application out there? If I write a GTK app and want to make it available for Ubuntu/Debian users through official repositories, I need to make sure it gets added to the official package list, and every time I make a new release, someone else somewhere else has to do additional work just to repackage the application so it is available in the repository.
Maybe a far-fetched analogy, but imagine if browser maintainers have to perform additional work every time a new website launches before it is available to its users.
Also, in this system, the application developer has a lot of extra work for making the application run and build against older versions of its dependencies. If I want to make my app available for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS which has libadwaita 1.1, I cannot use any of the new widgets in libadwaita 1.2 (released 6 months ago) or 1.3 (released earlier this month). I can use those widgets but I'll have to write ifdefs and provide fallback behavior/widgets when building/running against these older versions. I will also have to manually track the various distro versions to detect when I can remove the fallbacks from my codebase.
This is what Flatpak is for. Using Flatpak I can target a specific GNOME SDK version and make use of all the new code immediately, without having to write fallbacks. The downside is that when a user downloads my application through Flathub or another Flatpak repository, it might have to download the additional libraries as well, but they will be the correct versions and they won't be downloaded if that SDK is already available due to other Flatpak applications already installed.
Essentially, something like Flatpak is a middle-ground solution that trades of some disk space for the benefit of less work for distro maintainers (so they can focus on core packages) and less work for application developers (that can use more recent dependency versions and don't have to worry about the versions in other distro's)
What things are can change, sometimes for the better. Imagine if distros maintainers could spend their time doing something more productive than doing the same work as hundreds of others are doing.
Yeah but that the worst part of what they ARE and if they didn't have to spend so much time doing that maybe they could do more innovative things.
AppImages are not comparable with statically linked binaries.
Nonsense. Developers can do their thing, and distro maintainers can do theirs. The two have very different priorities and goals.
I'm perfectly happy downloading the latest version of hip package X directly from the developer's website while relying on distro packages for all the boring, stable stuff.
The whole "it's either all hip or all boring" is a false dichotomy.
That's ... kind of the job of a distro maintainer.
You know, that was never a problem when we had to package the other 500000 packages available in debian, just when users want seemingly popular packages updated more than once per decade. Firefox for starters.
But isn't that the primary job of a distro?
I resent having to install and maintain another package manager, and another set of base runtime libraries. I won't do it. Give me standalone binaries, give me source that compiles, but don't give me a link to some third party app store thingy.
...yeah, no.
Open sourcing your code doesn't mean you necessarily want people packaging it up for distribution elsewhere, because when they inevitably fall behind the release schedule and people get on old versions, you are often the one who gets the support triaging work. It is entirely reasonable to not want other people doing this.
Not being facetious, genuinely curious.
These should be absolute exceptions, not the rule, anyway.
Quite a few maintaining teams are the exact same people in Debian and Ubuntu.
