this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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This is much older than the posted date, so the terrain was way different, and the ecosystem was way different.
Caveat: I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.
His whole thing was wanting to package things much more like MacOS at the time. It was pretty foolproof from a user's perspective, but terrible for developers.
AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.
Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk...in theory. He hated it.
Once the rise of containers came along, and everyone was (still is) generally using them wrong, he had a fucking meltdown and tried to revive another packaging project which he quickly gave up on.
I mention all of this to say: don't just listen to what he's saying and take it at face value. Sure, he's a legend, but he's just a developer. He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer. There is no ONE right answer here, and things now are way better than when this was recorded maybe 10 years ago. WAY better.
He brought up specific things from the POV of working on subsurface where Linux made things a lot more difficult for them than every "consumer" operating system.
Which packaging projects? I don't even remember him talking about particular projects (aside from Debian itself), just about the general landscape of the problem and the attitudes of distro makers that have created it.
I notice neither of these has made all that much of an impact. I have never in my life used either one of them or been encouraged to by anyone else, it has always been package management, or Docker, or pick your binary tarball, or
curl | sudo shand cross fingers.He attained two totally separate attainable technical solutions which solved massive problems in the tech ecosystem and shape the landscape of computing today (one-and-a-half, GNU deserves quite a bit of credit.) I happen to agree mostly with his judgement on this particular problem, so it's easier for me to see it that way, but I definitely would not dismiss out-of-hand his judgement on the right way to approach significant problems.
Flatpaks are more common on the atomic distros I guess?
You also didn't mention Ubuntu snaps. Which is the greatest horror of them all. I wondered why people kept using firefox since it was so goddamn slow. But it turned out to be a snap which just needed 6+ seconds of initial startup time ( every time there was no active browser ). Switching to a .deb installation made Firefox the snappy ( hah! ) program I expected it to be.
I will never install Ubuntu again unless they completely ditch snaps.
Yeah. It feels like the issue is that really solving it is hard work (you can feel, with the proliferation of Linux/Windows runtimes that get downloaded behind the scenes for Steam, how much effort they're continuously putting into releasing new runtimes that make slight adjustments for particular issues), and organizations like Ubuntu are always tempted into these kind of "we'll just set up a simple system that means we don't have to work on it because it'll be solved" approaches.
Honestly I think Linus is being a little over simplistic about how easy it would be to create ABI compatibility in userland. In the kernel it's realistic, but in userland it would be hopeless. But he's not wrong that the current situation, however it arrived, is pretty crappy from a POV of wanting to ship something to people outside of the distro's package management, and IMO none of the solutions that have come along since then are effective at solving the problem.
It's called OnePackage
When did he discuss OnePackage or any other packaging project?