[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux

Technically true, but practically false. To this day I get told that I shouldn't be even trying to use software that isn't in the repo. There are still a whole lot of applications released with a Windows binary and a tar.xz of source for Linux.

At DebConf 2014, none other than Linus himself bitched out the community for how difficult distributing things for Linux was. It should not require an army of maintainers across a score of repos to distribute software. And it isn't like the technology to make it simple isn't available. AppImage has been around since 2004 (it was called Klik at the time) and its existence has and continues to be largely ignored by the community. Other parts of the community are openly hostile to the very concept of simple application distribution, like Drew DeVault.

The situation is so awful, that recently when I wanted to use an application on my Linux laptop I found it easier to run the Windows version under WINE than get the Linux version installed.

And the most infuriating thing about it all is how incredibly resistant the community is to doing anything to change this situation.

[kick]

AppImage & snapd & flatpak are poor solutions to a real problem. It's better to wait until someone comes up with a good solution than accept a bad one.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I would agree about snapd and flatpak, but AppImage is pretty close to ideal. The only more ideal way I can think of is if AppImage didn't require FUSE and could embed an icon (there was a proposal for an embedded icon standard in ELF, which was thoroughly ignored by the community).

It has been 20 years. How much longer should we wait for functionality the original Macintosh included in 1984?