Post #3276458

2026-04-30 08:05 UTC

@jcm @vwbusguy@mastodon.online @bookwar@floss.social by this definition Flathub and Homebrew are also distros. Technically it's correct, by I doubt most people think of those as distros. Think about it from upstream's point of view: If someone packages my software, why would I care if it is distributed to people with a package manager or in a bundle? Someone is still packaging my software and potentially breaking it or making changes to it that I never intended. Right, but in case of bash, coreutils etc can't really distribute themselves. Apps, on the other hand, have a lot of tools these days to do it. CLI programs have nix and brew (although both of them suck and are worse than flatpaks sadly), so they can also distribute themselves. If upstream can distribute themselves there isn't much sense in duplicating that work.

Replies (2)

@jcm@wafrn.jcm.re 2026-04-30 08:08

@vwbusguy@mastodon.online @bookwar@floss.social @tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud Only packages that aren't controlled by their own maintainers would be considered that. And imo rightfully so. If your Flatpak is maintained by an external person it's more or less equivalent to using the same software but packaged by a traditional Linux distro.

Open ##3276459
@jcm@wafrn.jcm.re 2026-04-30 08:19

@vwbusguy@mastodon.online @bookwar@floss.social @tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud Only if: upstream distributes itself for all relevant architectures (especially RISC-V tends to be problematic and the Ubuntu packages are saving my ass often) upstream backports security fixes, so users don't have to do breaking updates upstream provides timely updates when there is a security issue in any library the package includes I usually prefer upstream provided Snap, AppImage, or Flatpak packages myself too, but I don't think it's viable for all types of software, so some form of distributing will always happen.

Open ##3276465