Fedora Workstation: Our Vision for Linux Desktop
As a former member of the Red Hat desktop team who helped kickstart several of these initiatives (I did a huge chunk of Wayland, before I passed the reins off to Jonas Adahl), I believe in the vision, but like many other things in the Linux space, it&#x27;s fighting a very uphill battle for a vision that I personally believe is good, but I can&#x27;t ever imagine coming true, and when it does, one that&#x27;s far too late.<p>Immutability is good, splitting the OS from the applications is good, but what that should imply is a commitment to <i>not break anything</i>, and that&#x27;s not something you can really wrangle from open-source contributors, who are more interested in writing v7, v8, v9, etc. and deprecating everything before them (though I note this is not strictly a Linux problem, we&#x27;ve seen it in npm&#x2F;pypi&#x2F;rubygems and we&#x27;re even now seeing it from even big vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, but it tends to be more associated with FOSS&#x2F;Linux communities). Flatpak is an attempt at a technical band-aid for a social and cultural problem, but that culture only makes the problem worse, and the solution ineffective.<p>We see this now manifest in 100 different application distribution formats, all of which have giant tables of &quot;pro&#x27;s&quot; vs. &quot;con&#x27;s&quot; on their homepage, all which are fighting for an increasingly miniscule userbase, heightening a war which never should have existed in the first place. Much like the sound server debates of the 2000s, applications can&#x27;t simply choose one without getting into a large political turf war, and so they have to distribute in every format known to man to quell a userbase each interested in their own ideas of technical superiority. LibreOffice lists Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, <i>alongside</i> all of the individual distribution packages, right on their home page.<p>This is all to a userbase who&#x27;s more often interested with tinkering than stability. Linux communities tend to be ones who have self-selected that they want their computers to be toys, rather than tools to just get their jobs done. Or they believe in some form of Linux elitism; that Linux is somehow technically superior to other operating systems, and adapting good ideas from those other systems means losing some form of symbolic war, one which they&#x27;ll fight hard against. Moving the needle from a fun system that&#x27;s endlessly tinkerable to a boring system that runs the apps you need and is stable is attempting to move the culture in that direction, and honestly a lot of the desktop Linux community is just uninterested in that vision.<p>Also, while I was at Red Hat, Colin Walters was probably one of the smartest and most influential people I met, and they&#x27;re the real powerhouse behind a lot of these ideas (I remember when ostree was hacktree, somewhat made out of frustration so they didn&#x27;t have to break their laptop while testing new OS versions). Their writing and the conversations I had with them was one of the big things to get me out of the &quot;Linux elitism&quot; spell. I highly recommend their writing on these topics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~walters&#x2F;docs&#x2F;packages.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~walters&#x2F;docs&#x2F;packages.txt</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~walters&#x2F;docs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~walters&#x2F;docs&#x2F;</a>