Man needs to take his meds.

The post is just a word salad with not much meaning, never talks about the title and repeats it in the last paragraph, and with no source.

Just a waste of time, don't bother reading.

I will love flatpak when they make opt-in permissions

Flatpak is great. Using the bazaar store to install flatpaks is just so quick and easy. No dependencies, no package managers, no repos. Just click install and you have the app. Downside is permission management is still pretty poor but I'm hoping we can get to a point similar to android were that is all abstracted and centrally managed. Flatseal is an OK stop gap though but it's an a power user tool in its current state.

what if you have an old-ass copy of SDL2 in that AppImage which doesn't actually work very well on your system and breaks windowing, which I've actually seen happen?

flatpak suffers from this issue as well since most flatpak runtimes have less than 4 years of support (some like the GNOME runtime is only 1 year!).

More recently PPSSPP flatpak was broken because the flatpak runtime decided to replace SDL2 with sdl-compat which broke it: https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/issues/21075

yuzu also had a lot of issues with flatpak due to flatpak runtimes shipping outdated versions of mesa:

https://www.reddit.com/r/yuzu/comments/11307f0/glitches_on_steam_deck_flatpak_version_dont/j8o6gsa/

Also SDL is not well know for breaking its ABI, more likely what this person saw was the opssite, an issue in wayland that sdl-compat fixes and since the appimage shipped actual SDL2 there was no fix. Which is also the reason why a lot of distros now ship sdl-compat instead of sdl2 because it carries some fixes for wayland, but it can also break stuff badly lol

Topping off the shit salsa sandwich we find ourselves faced with in this situation is the fact that AppImage makes zero attempt to handle the problem of application distribution. It does not attempt to vindicate or expose your work to the end user

flatpak does not do that, flathub and the software stores are not part of flatpak.

Also kinda of crazy to say that appimage makes no attempt to fix application distribution when flatpak is just another docker and super bloated as result lol

Flatpak makes more sense for how Valve will be using it for all their new devices. Simple as that.

They "shit" money into ALL kinds of development that pushed lots of projects forward a decade in maybe a years time, and are doing it again with FEX. Are you taking issue with allmof that, or just this because they have a business use-case?

What's the TL;DR version of this?

TL;DR: Tribalism bad. I'm sure you've heard it before but it really needs repeating.

Most saddening of all is that the legitimate and valid communal focused ideology that the old guard purports to hold up - is actually being lived and expressed by the corporations those same people would argue are capturing the ecosystem. The guys out there with big Che Guevara energy are the real ones building and perpetuating a misery machine fueled by your ideology and nothing else. [...]
This is incontrovertible fact you can only fail to see if, to you, Linux is not the democratization of technology but instead the intimate satisfaction of init scripts sliding up your butthole in just the right way.
You cannot ever lose sight of who we as technologists are here to serve. Moms who don't know or care what the hell an init system is. Normal gamers who just want to chill and play Overwatch with their friends. Young children inspired by the genuinely good ideas of our forefathers that this ideological nonsense eventually will scare out of the community. That's the real loss behind all this. Every time you succumb to the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem and tell some poor clueless kid that can't run a bash script yet that he should run Mint on his gaming desktop because it's "stable" - that's one more person that inevitably decides we're all fucking crazy and never comes back and spends the rest of their lives telling everyone they know that Linux is hard and confusing when it hasn't been either of those things for years. [...]
This not only drives users away, but inevitably it discredits the positions of every single Linux enthusiast on Earth in the eyes of normal people. In many cases it's simply impossible to argue that Linux actually IS easy to use and learn and why that's the case, because the Linux community traumatized them and damaged their worldview so significantly that they think Linux enthusiasts and software engineers are all a bunch of crackpots that place absolutely no value on anyone's time or ease of use.

It's pretty hard to disagree with this guy after seeing the massive shitstorm over Age verification and Systemd's purported """willingness to participate""" these past few days.
I feel like we are days always from someone asking what distro to get and some huge comment section fight breaking out over OpenRC and Antix versus Systemd and Cachy or something along these lines.
Now imagine you as a newcomer with no Linux knowledge being on the receiving end of this mess. Yeah I get the point he's making.

And then you flip this to the "experts" view and:

"I just don't really see any reason to invest in AppImage considering the existence of Flatpak and the good work being done to improve generics." It seemed simple. Straightforward. Easy conclusion to arrive at. And before I've managed to wipe the sand off my phone screen and get back to enjoying myself, I'm suddenly getting all caps DMs from someone who hasn't participated in the community in months. I'm called arrogant. Closed minded. That I'm shutting down AppImage because I don't like how the sausage is made.

Like holy shit. Why the hell are people out there yelling at software maintainers about packaging decisions???
And I've seen people do this for Flatpak too.
"Why is this only available via Flatpak weh weh Red Hat is the devil!"

I understand not wanting to "cater to the normies". I understand wanting to have your own corner where you do things your way and don't give a shit about the needs of the regular Joe. I totally get it.
But people at large really need to stop yelling at other people not catering to them.

Want software packaged in X way? Do it yourself!

Lately DankPods (Aussie YouTuber) has been taking about his escape to Linux.
He talks about how he moved most of his needs (bar video editing and other minutiae) to Linux as it's the only platform he feels he "owns" / sees a future in.
Yet even him, said he'd almost rather not talk about it publicly because of the mountains of people in his comments yelling at him for choosing Bazzite over something else. Or accusing him of making Linux "Look bad" because of Nvidia issues despite him using the right Bazzite Edition for Nvidia. Or the people yelling "Why you still edit on Mac? Just Davinci on Linux bro" despite there being a billion quirks to it.

How on Earth has the community at large not moved on from Distro wars? Holy shit.

This is basically what the blog author is grasping at here. How many people have been driven away from Linux because of all this infighting? How many more will be?

I don't think I've ever read an opinion I agree with expressed this disagreeably before. The title is also weird given Valve doesn't officially support the Steam flatpak and AFAIK hasn't given any money to the flatpak devs.

How much money exactly? Last time I checked it was just salary for a couple of devs. That’s least they can do while taking 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales. That’s the kind of money that goes into significantly subsidising console hardware for comparison. They benefit so much from the work of others that went into Linux, Wine and the ecosystem already that they should be giving way more in return.

Confusing read. Also using "moms" as a shortcut to imply "non tech savvy people" is not a great choice. Way to antagonize and diminish women for the sake of a punchline.