Future and impact of ongoing projects in Linux world

[Xen]

Himanshu Shekhar schreef op 03-10-2016 16:33:

> 3. Flatpak vs Snaps. Both are about to turn great. However, I feel
> like all major decision makers should come together to work on one
> standardized desktop ecosystem, and rule out the chaos of different
> distributions. Both are independent efforts to standardize the same.
> However, if both process continue with full potential, the result lead
> to another debate : Flatpak vs Snaps, the same way we discuss today :
> rpm vs deb.

My personal take on snaps:

It is going to make stuff explode but not in a good way. There is a 
danger with "containerizing" things to begin with.

The people in #bash are hostile to Docker, for example. I don't really 
know why.

Apple used "containered" (or at least, packed) applications for a long 
time since OS X at least and we know how convenient it is but it also 
seems to be a limiting factor. "Installing" programs onto the system 
seems not such a bad thing at all.

The idea of having contained filesystems is not amenable (we can't be 
hostile to it) because it seems to make life so much easier.

Personally I still feel the MS Windows approach is best. For I now see 
these alternatives that currently exist:

- Linux with shared libraries and fixed paths for the most part.
- Windows with a high degree of independence and "full package" installs 
including libraries and dependencies because the base system does not 
receive many "core" updates.
- Mac with applications as a package that is never really installed but 
only "dropped in place" after which the system provides access to them.

The only upgrades that Windows ever received were VC++ redistributables, 
later .NET redistributables, and DirectX. There was nothing more than 
that. These were usually easy and solit to install and easy to 
distribute with your application.

This "base system with updates" seems to work very well.

But having isolated instances may make things very much harder to 
diagnose as well, I am sure. The thing Microsoft was missing was a way 
for an application to define an /addition/ to the system that could 
easily be removed (or reverted). It needed layers where applications 
added to the registry in such a way that this addition could easily be 
removed again. Not isolated containers, but layering on top of each 
other as a consistent state of being or at least as a way to record 
transactions so as to be able to play them back.

A form of 'jailing' that Windows is still missing to this day.

So what about snaps then?

- please, not another top level directory
- I wish they would improve existing packages (format, structure) as it 
exists on the hard disk, not create something entirely new again
- I wish first they would just solve the "portability" issue of regular 
packages and introduce the solutions to the dynamic linking problem 
(with paths) that already exist.
- I wish, then, that they would first just enable regular systems to 
have "portable applications" and for the system administrator (system 
wide systems such as syslog, and cron) to become less important and for 
the user to have more ability without constantly needing to attain root 
rights.

* There are user crontabs, but it is an arcane technology
* It's not really possible for a user to easily configure logging 
without being root (and system-wide).
* There is not really anything that runs *for* the user that allows task 
scheduling without it being run by a system-wide thing.

In short, the discrepancy between what a user can do and what root can 
do, is too big.