On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 10:27 AM, Christian Schaller <cschalle@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That is not 100% correct. You can make a non-sandboxed Flatpak and > it would work just as well as an RPM in terms of hardware access. > Enabling sandboxing however would need some thought and development > for a lot of such applications, but we are slowly but surely working > on it through things like the PulseAudio and Pinos work that Wim Taymans > is doing, and through the work that Alex Larsson has been doing with OpenGL. There's also the fact that the runtimes provided also crash on most of my computers, but hey, that's just a small thing, right? Speaking with my Fedora and Mageia hats, there's nothing that stops ANYONE from making portable RPMs (I've done it fairly easily myself). Flatpak, AppImage, Snappy, etc. do not provide any material advantages without some sandboxing. In fact, they just make applications more bloated for little to no benefit at that point. IMO, the only reason that we're starting to see this is because we're increasingly giving up on Free Software (note capital letters). These systems primarily benefit nonfree/proprietary software developers. Speaking with my Snappy hat on, the concept of making it possible for people to make applications that work everywhere and anywhere is a very nice dream. But it's important to realize that the integration work has to happen somewhere. Flatpak is moving too slowly in this regard, and while Snappy has this functionality in spades, it requires much deeper integration into the distribution than Flatpak does. The main things keeping snaps from being a first class citizen on Fedora are the inability to produce snaps based on a Fedora base and Fedora packages (that's being worked on) and the lack of SELinux integration (also being worked on). I've personally been working on these things for the Snappy system, but the Flatpak guys seem to be doing *nothing* about it. I'm very disappointed in the progress of the Flatpak system. To date, it is still not possible to install Flatpaks through Plasma Discover like it is through GNOME Software. It is not possible to build Flatpaks from RPMs in such a manner where Fedora-based runtimes could power software. (Hint: both GNOME and KDE app stores support Snappy!) There is no evangelism from the people working on Flatpak to demonstrate the technology and drive any useful interest. The sandboxing in Flatpak is so restrictive that it's not possible to use it for a very wide variety of common applications. Even applications like VLC are not properly functional in Flatpak, whereas they are as a Snap. Speaking without any of my hats on, Flatpak and Snap both offer a different way to distribution various classes of applications. But we're still at the point where they are not overly useful. And I'm getting increasingly upset with the Fedora Workstation WG over their attitude of discouraging people from contributing software to Fedora as RPMs. The proposals I've seen from them about automatically removing RPMs in favor of Flatpaks or hiding them so that they are not obvious or easy to install are horrifyingly bad. I'm increasingly worried that the Workstation WG has lost sight of our founding principles as a project, and are forgetting that our goal is to make the best Free system out there, to show that Free Software is the best model for producing a high-quality system. What has happened to Fedora? What has happened to us? -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
