Linux

Yes, the packaging mess that Atomic distros cause.

I want a couple of functional things:

• To be able to safely upgrade my system silently, without interruptions, and rollback of necessary
• To know my system is not drifting away from upstream defaults and to restore it to a “factory” state
• To sandbox applications

I’d like to be able to do all that efficiently and cleanly too. Atomic systems generally fulfill those first two while traditional distros struggle, which is why I stick to Atomic distros.

But whereas you can use a single package manager on Arch and get everything (albeit without easy sandboxing), Atomics keep adding more and more. Here’s your rpm-ostree, flatpak, toolbox, homebrew, sysexts, etc.

I find sysexts particularly insulting because they regress so much on traditional packages for so little upside. Doesn’t even have dependency management.

I would wish we would stop creating so many package managers and just focus on improving existing ones.

In a more ideal world we would have something like

• Distro based on Freedesktop runtimes
• Flatpak that officially supports both GUI applications, CLI applications, and even daemons/services
• Flatpak would also be able to reuse the Freedesktop runtimes of the host system