[GTALUG] Flatpak: Anyone with Experience or Opinions on It?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dhaval Giani via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| > As an example of the role of distros, consider the Linux Kernel.  It
| > used to be common for folks to take the Linus kernel and build it on
| > their own machine and use it in place of their distro's kernel.  It
| > wasn't too hard.  Linus went to some trouble to make sure a release
| > was clean.  I infer that things have changed.  All distros take a raw
| > release and fix it up before shipping it.  And you want those fixes.
| > It's not impossible to build a Linus kernel and use it but it is
| > probably not worthwhile.
| 
| Define: all distros :-).

I think that my description covers them all.  That does not in any way
imply that all distros do identical things.

| Fedora keeps updating to the latest mainline
| (stable) and is quite aggressive in its upgrade schedule. RHEL, SLES
| (and other enterprise distros) not so much. RHEL and SLES have
| different stability models (which require them to backport a lot of
| patches). Canonical sticks to one release for its entire release life
| (which has them somewhere in between).

Sure.

I didn't know that about Ubuntu.

RHEL seems too conservative for me.  The policy might be because some
customers create kernel code that might break if an internal kernel
API changes, and Linus reserves the right to change that.

| The kernel is actually a really
| terrible example of flatpaks because it doesn't have dependencies like
| other packages.

Perhaps.  But it is an example of the role of distros (all I claimed).
As I said at the start, I don't have any experience with flatpaks or
snaps (to my knowledge).