As a PHP developer

I’m so, so sorry.

Hmm, yeah my PC is about 2-3 years old now and it booted just fine. If normal Arch can boot (EFI ideally), then Garuda should be good.

Garuda Dragonized

You are right. They can’t for every distro.

But fedora/rhel, Ubuntu/debian, and arch-based distros are the most commonly used. So they can provide official packages for those, and/or as the OP said, provide an official flatpak.

And to be fair, it’s a nice-to-have to have a better sense of trust, but given the unofficial ones are open source, it’s quite likely any maliciousness would be rooted out very quickly.

I’m sorry you’re having to deal with that – especially for a technology we’d all like to see in that space to provide good competition to the main two. Thanks for your efforts to push that forward!

I feel that pain, but probably not to the same degree. I’ve backed over 300 campaigns on Kickstarter and Gamefound. I’ve had around 8 that didn’t fulfill and didn’t give a refund – somewhere in the vicinity of $500-800 worth overall. It’s maddening when it feels like our money was either stolen or at best, wasted.

From what I’ve read and listened to, they’re misleading in this report when they say all crowdfunding backer devices have been fulfilled/delivered.

Asking for and/or expecting unpaid volunteers is most definitely not valid.

If he wants to pay them properly, then I would agree.

…and the wheel turns again…

So is it pho-to-pi-a? Or photo pee?

I wonder if you typed that with a straight face. If so then you are wildly out of touch with how FOSS and the democratization of FOSS development works.

You use words like “entitled” as a derogatory term when you clearly don’t understand that yes, the community is entitled because that’s how these FOSS licenses work. And people have every right to be upset when the status quo changes for a project they have also helped develop and helped get popular.

So either you are trolling, or you are clueless. Either way you should be ignored and this is as much time I’m going to waste writing this comment.

Compared to Plex and any modern UI, it’s garbage. But I agree it does indeed work well enough. Just not my cup of tea.

I also use Plex, but it is definitely not FOSS. Jellyfin is a thing, the UI needs a LOT of work, though.

I prefer Plex mainly because it has allowed me to easily share to family without any real barriers except that the account information is controlled by a for-profit company. And to be fair to myself, I was a Plex user before it left the OSS world, back when it was a simple fork of XBMC. So I’ve been bought-in since its early versions.

If people want the Linux desktop to become more ubiquitous in homes, it better damn well be the next evolution. Someone’s grandmother isn’t going to get on the command line when apt inevitably decides to break.

The concept is not new, and Apple has had .app containers for a very long time that almost always just works. So clearly the concept has long been proven.

Perhaps flatpak, snap, appimage aren’t the final forms of this concept on Linux, but it’s a step toward making application packaging and distribution much more friendly for the common masses.

Just a shot in the dark, but it sounds like you have never maintained software. If you have, then my apologies, but your experience must not have included much by way of dependency and version management. Dependencies and versions are a major source of headache for any software engineer and it’s a problem of our own making.

Having completely self-contained applications, while more bloated, makes maintenance and distribution exceedingly simpler and puts the burden of managing that solely on the developer of said application instead of burdening everyone down the line.

I remember when package managers didn’t exist. It was painful. This is the next step in the evolution of the Linux desktop that was mostly solved in Windows and effectively completely solved on macOS since some early 10.x version.

There is only one reason to use an API — a developer has a use-case for it. Setting aside all of the security concerns, the existence of some API proxy is not useful in and of itself. Not only is it dead simple to set something like that up, by oneself, thus eliminating the security risks of relying on a third party, it’s just not going to gain traction if it doesn’t add something that makes it more useful than simply calling the endpoint API.

It’s cool you’re looking to try things, but perhaps coming up with a novel service would be a better use of time and effort.

I wish you luck.