[ClassyJacket]

I truly believe that once Linux solves its app packaging problem it could go mainstream for casual use on home laptops. (Office machines obviously are a different beast, needing Microsoft Office\365 support, etc).

We're 99% of the way to being able to hand an everyday person a laptop with Linux on it and have them have a decent experience - but they need to be able to go to a website and download a program without screwing around with package managers and wondering if someone's even made a package for their distro. Flatpak and Snap are great, but then you still have to worry about which of those, if any, your computer supports. That's fine for anyone on Hacker News, but it's not fine for my parents or most people who don't take a special interest in tech.

If they do that, 2078 really could be the year of the Linux Desktop. But in the meantime we'll all have been using Steam Decks anyway.

Tho if it does become mainstream I do admit I'll miss feeling special and smart.

[Andrex]

Flatpak is winning and will ultimately win. Flathub is really good and has momentum behind it.

[udev4096]

https://flatkill.org

[mixmastamyk]

App stores already solved this for regular folks.

[hansvm]

Suppose websites don't change. What should Linux do about:

1. Packages only offering building from source for the Linux crowd.

2. Packages with soft DRM, offering Windows builds easily and Linux builds referencing the forums.

3. Packages with hard DRM, actively rejecting attempts to run on Linux.

4. "Downloads" built for YUM or APT or whatever.

5. "Downloads" which are basically just scripts designed to shit all over your directory structure and do the real installation later.

6. Downloads only available for a particular distro, and only then by trusting a third-party repo and otherwise doing key-based shenanigans.

...

I bet you could get a decent chunk of the way there with a script turning the "normal" install procedure from that above garbage into a nice desktop icon and an easily deletable binary (with an associated uninstallation script), but people package software differently for Linux than they do for other OS's, and unless you change that part of the culture or manually package a lot more things I don't think you'll solve that particular problem.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Does one really care?

Have you looked at

https://www.clearlinux.org/ https://github.com/clearlinux

https://cachyos.org/ https://github.com/CachyOS

https://mxlinux.org/ https://github.com/MX-Linux ?

Would they lack anything? I picked these three specifically because I tested them recently on new hardware I got.

What they have in common is their focus on encapsulating 4. for mere mortals, while not doing 5, or at least not more so than it's common for Windows.