Man, this became so bad in the last five years or so.

Just bought a digital drawing tablet from a manufacturer who claim their products have Linux support. Plugged it in and went to their download lage. Of course, there would not be a link to their GitHub project and instead I got a .deb and a .rpm, which is totally useless to me because my system is neither Debian/Ubuntu nor even glibc.

That. Historically, upsteam provided sources, and downstream distros packaged it however they want to. If anything, the developer would package it for their own use on the distro(s) they use.

Is it weird for the users? Kind of. But it still makes the most sense: you can’t expect the developers to know how to properly integrate a package in every distro. And what usually happens is that we end up with packages that ships static binaries and puts the app in /opt and call it a day.

I’m an inactive maintainer for [The Lounge](https://thelounge chat), and the result of us trying to package for multiple distros is that we store chat logs in /etc/thelounge because the project is designed mostly for the Docker version, which uses just one “data” folder. The project prefers consistency for the users, so the deb and Arch packages are both fairly questionable. I get reports for this from time to time in the AUR comments, and I’d have to step over the other project maintainers to split it into /etc/thelounge and /var/lib/thelounge as it should. If packaging remained independent, I could adapt the package better for Arch’s FSH.

The universal platform for developers that want to offer end users a prepackaged way that works on every distro is Flatpak. Personally I prefer to install natively where possible, but I think it’s a good middleground between users having to figure it out, without developers stepping over the distro’s package structure. Users that want a native package can get good quality ones or build it themselves, while less experienced users can just use the developer-supported installation method.

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Flatpak do share libraries, thats what gtk and kde platform flatpaks are. Flatpaks are designed around average GUI bound users. So concerns of using a few dozen megs of libraries for their multi-gig electron apps aren’t really relavent.

Flatpak has really brought to light the question of whether its a distro’s, or a developer’s responsibility to create packages. I personally believe it should be the distro. Devs should be making good software, and if they want to provide a package, then great, but I never have an expectation from any dev of more than source + build instructions. Even a precompiled binary is not an expectation, because then you have glibc vs musl vs windows vs *bsd, and debian stable uses an older version thats maybe not compatable, or maybe arch is too new and doesn’t work yet, and it just goes back to the packaging expectation. So packages of any kind directly from a developer is a courtesy. If you want more packages in a distros repo, that they are building and maintaining, then they should be the ones you levy your complaints.

I see flatpacks kinda bad. Try to switch browsers and import data from browser running a flatpack :) #Impossible

@socphoenix Until you need two versions of Python because… reasons. When building software it also becomes a hassle: You must have the specific dynamically linked environment or your binary is useless. Solutions are either statically linked builds or containers, flatpaks, etc… Containers can cache dependencies as layers to preserve space however. Besides, space is cheap. Sorry for watering your lawn, but it was kind of dry.