Re: Is The Linux Desktop In Trouble?

On Mon, 15 Apr 2019 10:39:02 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:

> 'First, even Linus Torvalds is tired of the fragmentation
> in the Linux desktop.'

You say “fragmentation”, I say “competition” and “choice”.
People like to say “the market can’t sustain all these choices”, yet
the fact that they have persisted all these years, and even continued
to thrive, gives the lie to that claim. The laws of economics work,
whether you like them or not.

> 'That makes life harder for developers.'

No it doesn’t. It makes life harder for *proprietary* developers.
Developers of Free Software have no trouble: release the source,
including the necessary build scripts, and the distro maintainers are
able to produce their own packages pretty much automatically, using
their own packaging tools. Simple. How do you think a distro like
Debian is able to offer something like 50,000 packages in its
repositories?

> 'Torvalds thinks there's been some progress. For software
> installation, he likes Flatpak.'

Which causes its own headaches. Look at the long discussion starting
here
<https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2019-January/006421.html>
about how to manage Fontconfig caches for fonts coming from Flatpak
packages -- it’s not a straightforward matter. How do you deal with
duplicate fonts coming from different Flatpaks?

> His solution? Having a foundation create a common desktop for all
> Linux distros ...

Ah, the usual solution to having too many standards: create yet another
one.
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