If at all, you want to use Gentoo’s ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.

Yeah, but

1. Using a tool that allows you to build using OBS once, and distribute for all distros is already a solution that makes it possible to target all of Linux.

2. Flatpak’s sandbox isn’t really doing much for security/privacy as addressed by this: https://flatkill.org/2020 (Main concerns relate to pretty much every app escaping the sandbox making the sandbox essentially useless, and concerns that application runtimes bundled with flatpak are far less likely to be updated and patched than dependencies on your host system, and runtimes often actively contain security holes that are unpatched for runtime versions still used by applications.

BUT BUT

I have to agree that if it gets companies to support more Linux software, then I’m sure we can deal with it. HOWEVER, there is another issue, the issue of confusion. After all, isn’t one of the main reasons for trying to get more software on Linux, to use that software to get more people to use Linux? For that we need a more user-friendly approach, we need to figure out how to get less permissive, well, permissions, to applications, as well as to apply system theming by default (I know theming is controversial with the whole “don’t theme my apps” debacle but I think it would be great to have

AND YES, this post was mostly an experiment to see what people think and how they’d react to differing opinions different from the status quo. I’m actually team Flatpak. I think what Ubuntu has recently done to improve Snap speeds is great (now if only all the apps on Snapcraft updated to implement it all), but almost no apps have taken advantage of it. AppImage shows some promise in its simplicity, but that sacrifices a lot of usability and makes a lot of the improvements seen in snap and especially in Flatpak near-impossible (for example theming and .desktop file support).

I’ll be honest, probably the only issues I have with flatpak are:

1. having to type the whole thing. What I mean is running “flatpak run one.ablaze.floorp” instead of just “floorp”, for example. How about we do away with the whole “org.ablaze.floorp” and make it possible to just use “floorp”, the same way you can do that during an installation! If it’s been implemented for “flatpak install”, why not “flatpak run”, and even better, why not make it into some sort of alias, where you can run, say, “floorp-flatpak” from Terminal or a Run launcher?

2. Flatseal. I mean, Flathub has THE control center for Flatpak apps and nobody has taken it upon themselves to make this more official (this should be like a standard package imo).

3. Also for Flatseal specifically, can we make it easier to theme (gtk and qt) apps, (like a dropdown or something?) instead of having to look up the envvar name because I can’t remember it?

4. Can we find a way to force apps that don’t really need full filesystem permissions to remove that? Maybe just have certain user folders, like Downloads and Pictures instead of the entire home directory as most apps simply don’t need this level of access? Maybe make the Flathub team decide on a case by case basis if the app really needs all that access and ask the dev to restrict that as a requirement for being added to Flathub? If you claim to offer security and privacy, might as well prove it.

I think that’s about it.

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