[pompino]

>Install a specific app version from flatpak, download binaries, or compile it yourself for your current system.

Then you can't have those dependencies managed by a package manager, which means you'll constantly be compiling (and dealing with conflicts yourself). This is not a viable path forward as it seems to be presented here.

>You have so many ways to do this - same as you're doing on windows.

On Windows I copy a binary and run it w/o giving a crap about the OS updates. Vastly different workflows for it to be called "same".

[viraptor]

> On Windows I copy a binary and run it w/o giving a crap about the OS updates.

You don't just copy the binary on windows. You copy the binary and its dependencies. Unless it's based on .Net-framework, then yeah, you still care about it being updated through windows.

> Then you can't have those dependencies managed by a package manager, which means you'll constantly be compiling (and dealing with conflicts yourself).

That's not right. You don't need to use dependencies from the system. If you're compiling yourself, you can either make them static, or use your custom location. In either case, there are no conflicts to deal with.

If you're using whole app packages, then you don't care about system deps at all. Flatpak apps ship their whole environment. AppImage apps do too, just without full isolation. (https://appimage.github.io/apps/ entries are all "download-and-run")

[pompino]

>You don't just copy the binary on windows. You copy the binary and its dependencies. Unless it's based on .Net-framework, then yeah, you still care about it being updated through windows.

Sure, but I can install s/w built for Windows XP into Windows 11 and it will just run 20 years later w/o modification - And I can do this with a large amount of commercial software, so its not a special case example which you can demonstrate on any OS. Simply not possible on any other desktop OS. Even if you have the source (which you won't for commercial s/w), its not just a simple recompile after 20 years.

>You don't need to use dependencies from the system. If you're compiling yourself, you can either make them static, or use your custom location. In either case, there are no conflicts to deal with

Static linking glibc.. yeah. :)

>If you're using whole app packages, then you don't care about system deps at all. Flatpak apps ship their whole environment. AppImage apps do too, just without full isolation. (https://appimage.github.io/apps/ entries are all "download-and-run")

Yet another "standard" that ultimately will fracture the deployment of software. These are just buggy half-baked standards anyway. Vendor releases 32bit AppImage and goes out of business, it stops working on 64bit OS.

I don't think you guys really get the insane backwards compatibility effort that Microsoft does to help keep line of business applications running.