How do I get my favorite app included as a user? As a publisher? The maintainer has his own schedule. What if I have a closed-source app? I presume it's just better than PPA and *.deb-s (which would be acceptable if all desktop Linux was based on Ubuntu).

There is AppImage (https://appimage.org/). I have no affiliation with it whatsoever, but if you're not going to have a verified Snap account, I think you're better off offering an AppImage from your website. And it seems like some companies are thinking about something like this (https://github.com/itchio/itch/issues/683).

If your Snap account is unverified, there seems to be no way to know who created the snap. It looks like I can create an account with the name of any company and distribute stuff in their name, including malware.

With something like AppImage, your users know that the AppImage is actually coming from you if you host the file on your domain. Then again, AppImage has its own drawbacks. But at least, if Slack put an official AppImage on its homepage, I'd be able to download it. Installing a Slack snap from the account of "Felix Rieseberg" doesn't sound to good to me (https://snapcraft.io/slack). If you dig around, you can see that Felix Rieseberg does work at Slack, but for this big a company, that just looks fishy IMO.

Verified accounts are pretty new, I suspect we'll see Slack verified soon.

You ask. Find a maintainer who works on similar or related software and send them an email. Send them a patch.

Your closed source app can shove it.

… and then wait 13 years with no response. (-:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=334120

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/459566/5132

You have to be proactive. Contact the maintainers directly, reach out to other maintainers, etc.

Debian Developer Stephen Kitt said the opposite, as you can see.

yeah. that's wishy-washy dreamworld. For 20 years Ive been using Linux - noone bothered packaging A-level apps for Linux, definitely not closed source ones. That's been enough of a trial run I would say.

So your argument is that anyone who wants to use any proprietary software should just switch to Windows?

I suppose I should stop using Linux then, because I occasionally play games from Steam.

And your games are spying on you. Many of these games employ invasive anti-cheat systems which shake down your computer and send a bunch of data to their servers. This shit doesn't fly with distro packages.

Yeah, they definitely wouldn't be in distro packages, but I want to play them nonetheless. That means I either have to run software which isn't in my distro repo, or switch to Windows.

Just don't ask about using WINE. (-:

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/460036/

You wish! Which distro are you talking about? Can't be Ubuntu for sure...

Ubuntu is an outlier, not a representative of all of Linux. Linux is open source, you can make a distro that does anything you want, including spying on others. This doesn't make the distros that don't any worse.

This attitude is the reason Linux Desktops suck and will continue to suck.

Actually they don't. I use Linux Mint Cinnamon for 5 years and find it a very convenient operating system, better than Windows (at least 7 — I hear nothing good about Win7 except its Linux support) and OSX (at least Snow Leopard) in almost every respect, except commercial app support. I very reluctantly reboot into Windows for things like Office, Lightroom and CorelDraw. Maybe Visual Studio.

edit: btw, I agree with you on the "attitude" thing. There should be more commercial options on Linux desktop.

It was a subjective assessment to be sure, but one shared by many. You can tell because of how few users it has, though I'm sure someone will pop up and blame the fact that it doesn't come pre-installed on PCs as the reason, without consideration for the concept that if people actually wanted to use it, it might.

eh, i disagree. even if linux distros were objectively better than windows in every possible way (not speaking to the truth of that claim) if computers shipped with windows the vast majority of people would use windows.

The vast majority of Windows PCs do not ship with Chrome.

But the vast majority of internet users do use Google search and other Google products like Gmail. That's how Chrome became popular — because Google will spam you with ads for Chrome at every available opportunity.

And how did Google get popular despite Microsoft owning the OS? And for that matter, IE? My point is, people tend to use software they like. The reason Linux Desktop, despite decades of evangelism, hasn't taken off is that people don't like it. It's that simple, but the evangelists keep deluding themselves because making it better will require them to do hard things, like work together.

Wait, some of us are trying to change that.

affiliation: tech lead for the snapcraft tool and linux user since 1999.

To my knowledge, there have been at least 4 other attempts to have sane application distribution on Linux over the years:

Application Bundles (GNUStep), AppDirs (ROX), Flatpak (formerly xdg-app), and AppImage (formerly Klik).

But Canonical invented a fifth anyway. Forgive me if I'm skeptical that change will actually occur this time.

Also Nix and Guix.

Those are just package managers trying to be less crap than currently existing package managers. Vendors still aren't expected to create and deploy the application directly to the user.

Also, in that category, you forgot Gobo.