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Did we kill Linux's killer feature?
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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No. (Or maybe yes. See Edit)
Ultimately, you are the one that decided to install things outside of your distro's package manager. If you don't like what happens as a result... then don't do that.
You are completely able to use the built-in package manager to achieve what we had "a few years ago". If you want something that isn't available in the package manager you can do what we did "a few years ago" and install it separately yourself (from source, flatpaks, snaps, appimage). Or you could become a package maintainer for that package and get it added as a package for your distro. It's completely up to you and in no way different frmo what it was a few years ago.
Edit: after finding out from @mfat@lemdro.id that Fedora does in fact officially support Flatpak, I do indeed think that they could do better in how they support that.
What you say is true when this is explicitly stated by the OS. When the average user uses the Software app they are presented with many Flatpak results. Flatpaks are presented as offerings by the distro, not something "outside of the distro's package manager." Should the average user be supposed to check the origin of every app and know about Flatpaks?
Plus if you use the most popular distro it already comes with default snap apps.
Oh! I had no idea Fedora was officially supporting Flatpaks these days. I used Fedora from when it was Fedora Core 3 in 2004 until about 2015. Since it was the distro I cut my teeth on, I assumed I was familiar, but it's wild to think it's been nearly a decade since I've used it...
I completely agree that they should come up with a unified way for managing packages that they officially support. But also, a few years ago, if things weren't in the default package manager then we had to build them ourselves because they can't be expected to do everything for us.
So I don't think we killed the killer feature. I simply think people have more options these days (although I see how some might see this as more rope with which to hang themselves)
I'll update my original post to clarify that I was wrong