As for root requirements, what you are asking for are (non privileged) user installable packages. Packages that install only to the user account. This feature doesn't exist, but it'd be a much saner approach than snap/flatpak.
The system package manager is convenient when it works, because it's already there. But that's about it. Using it to install any random apps is a recipe for disaster, it leads to fragmentation since everyone on a different distro uses different commands/workarounds to fuck up their systems in different ways when trying to install poorly packaged software.
If everyone just used Debian, we wouldn't need Flatpak, but obviously that's not the case. Whenever you find a "linux app" that's packaged for distroA, but you're on distroB, there's a chance that it will work. That is 100% luck and coincidence, because most linux distros just so happen to ship the same family of system software/libs, sometimes even with the same versions.
Rather than leave it up to the undefined behavior lottery, a standardized non-system packaging format can guarantee that things will work across any distro. That's better for everyone involved: users, sysadmins, distro maintainers, and developers. Whether Flatpak is that format idk, but IMO it's the best overall out of the three main contenders (Flatpak, Snap, AppImage)
I don’t think building MSI installers is especially difficult; it’s kind of a set-it-and-forget-it thing. Configure Wix or Inno Setup once and then you’re good to go (on every Windows machine, no need to worry about multiple distros).
That means you need three builds to cover Ubuntu and its derivatives (20.04, 22.04, 22.10). Two to cover Debian (10 and 11). Three to cover RHEL (7,8,9) and also a few more if you want to support Fedora. If you want to support multiple architectures you get at least twice as much builds.
No matter how you put it, that's a lot more work than maintaining a simple flatpak manifest, which allows you to target all those platforms with one automated build for each architecture. And you also get the benefit of being placed in the app store and not being hold back by whatever API is the lowest-common-denominator between all those platforms or having to clutter your code base with `ifdef`s; if you want your app to use an API which was only added in GLib 2.74, then you can just do that and it'll work.
Linux distros have a history of abandoning useful, well-understood technology for fads that then cause power users all kinds of headaches later-on (e.g. by cluttering output of useful tools like mount). Eventually, power users just lose the will to adapt, and move on.
Could I have just switched distros, or compiled my own stuff? Sure. But I am no longer a student. I am become a mid-40s guy who is becoming aware his lifetime is not unlimited and can be spent better than learning the ropes of a new system.
In the time of Jenkins et al the burden of creating bistro-specific packages is negligible.
Flatpaks/Snaps are almost exactly the same, conceptually, as apps on MacOS. Go look inside something in /Applications/... The .app is a folder, with all of its deps.
> Linux distros have a history of abandoning useful, well-understood technology for fads that then cause power users all kinds of headaches later-on (e.g. by cluttering output of useful tools like mount). Eventually, power users just lose the will to adapt, and move on.
"Power users" have a history of complaining about distro maintainers abandoning useful, well-understood techology because the "power users" don't actually understand the technology, nor do the understand the enormous headaches it causes distro maintainers to put a sane face on 30 year old design philosophies and continue moving forward.
The goal of distro maintainers is to STOP investing endless man hours in trying to make X work with high DPI displays, scaling, high refresh rates, a fundamentally insecure design model, and so on. The goal of systemd is/was for distro maintainers to STOP wasting endless man hours on edge cases because sysvinit didn't have reasonable mechanisms for "if anything in this dependency chain is restarted or changed, re-evaluate it" or "don't try to start this service if the mount isn't available so systems stop hanging on startup if some NFS server isn't available" or whatever.
> In the time of Jenkins et al the burden of creating bistro-specific packages is negligible.
Under the assumption that they are ABI stable, which is a bad one. Otherwise, it's the same old kaleidoscope of mapping out whether it's `libfoo-dev`, `libfoo-devel` for build requirements, whether it's a distro with a completely different naming system, dissecting the ELF header or reversing depchains in Python/Node/whatever to try to find deps and what THOSE are named in some distro, or whether they're even packaged at all, then building for every possible supported version of RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, and down the line.
This is why "power users" aren't an important user model. Arch, Gentoo, Nix, and others exist if you want to be a "power user". Otherwise, extremely naive assumptions about the amount of effort expended by distro/package maintainers hand-wave the complexity away with "duh, just put it in Jenkins."
Flatpak/Snap are essentially a re-invention of putting things in /opt and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH or chrooting. Disk space is much less of a concern than it was before, and sacrificing a little space to AVOID the mess of shit above is a good investment.
The goal of systemd is to make everyone do everything the way Lennart Poettering likes it on his personal laptop. Perhaps some of it is nice but also some of it is not nice. And his holier and smarter than thou attitude is off putting and rightly so.
And don’t handwave away wasting my resources just so you can avoid work. That’s how we end up with Microsoft Teams.
That said, no, Lennart did not/does not do things that way on his personal laptop. His position is that users shouldn't need to know how to configure dnsmasq to have a local caching DNS server, that 99% of the options for dhcpcd aren't used by 99% of users (who are perfectly happy to simply get an address in a fraction of the time), that most users don't need to know how to configure /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* or /etc/network/interfaces/* for their use case.
If you do, you can disable those things. You can think this is a good opinion or a bad opinion, but at least he's pushing towards some kind of solution which isn't "RTFM". If you think his ideas are bad, propose new ones. Start a project which does it better. "Just don't change anything" is not a meaningful or productive way to design software or operating systems.
Anyway I’m not about to engage the systemd evangelization task force, thanks. Good luck elsewhere.
Surely distros could be based on top of Nix with carefully curated sets of packages with less effort than it takes to package everything for Debian.
They could be based on top of Nix. In practice, it's more likely they'd be based on top of rpm-ostree. But that doesn't do anything to close the gap between the wild west of copr/ppa/aur and "get your application accepted into mainline repos" for someone who wants to distribute their app.
Apt should be used only for system software (like init system, system libraries) but not for applications.
Also apt allows to run scripts as root during installation and this is not secure.