I feel like inmutable distros are in a quite good state nowadays, and while solutions like bootc and sysexts are not “mainstream” yet, it’s getting there
when it comes to getting non Flatpak packages, things get interesting, there are a lot of options, really
AppImages, statically linked binaries, tarballs, OCI containers, distrobox/toolbx, Homebrew, VMs, Nix even experimental formats like RunImages, AppBundles and FlatImages
if you need some non-system level package, you’ll have a way to use it yet, still it seems sort of chaotic “which one should I choose? how will I be able to easily manage them?”
GPM, dbin, Soar, AM… and the list goes on
and it’s okay, the so called cloud native approach is still evolving, so this fragmentation is expected so it’s nice to share opinions about this while we’re living this interesting phase any thoughts?
Distrobox excels for when you need some proprietary tool that ships it’s packages as a repo for Ubuntu but not much else. You spin up a distrobox for Cisco Packet Tracer, or VSCode (the proprietary microsoft one, not Arch’s Code-OSS and Unity.
Then, once you’re done, you can just delete it all.
this, even a tarball would have been better than a Ubuntu-only .deb
If the tarball was dynamically linked against specific distro’s libraries though, then it wouldn’t work on all distros.
They also often provide RPM packages for Red Hat systems. Not always though, and I use Arch (btw) anyways.
really? by the time I needed it, there were only .deb available, and they did not listed all their dependencies on Debian, only on Ubuntu, I had to look for their dependencies and install them manually, what a mess
Not everybody does. It’s just sometimes.