Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

https://www.osnews.com/story/145071/flatpak-will-depend-on-systemd/

33•birdculture•53m ago

Comments

embedding-shape•18m ago

So for us who want to continue distribute across multiple distributions, even those that doesn't run systemd, is there only AppImage remaining now as a truly cross-distribution packaging format?

ChocolateGod•10m ago

AppImage isn't truly cross distribution in the first place because how it handles dependencies is not truly portable.

bitwize•7m ago

Errbody seems to use AppImage anyway

zx8080•17m ago

> The current version of Flatpak will continue to see a ton of improvements, but at the same time, the limits of what can be done with its decades-old design have become harder and harder to work around. As such, they’re also planning for and working on what they call Flatpak Next, or perhaps Flatpak 2.0, which is effectively a rewrite of Flatpak based on what they’ve learned over the years, making use of modern technologies

Nit: on "decades-old", Flatpack is from ~2016 only.

nar001•4m ago

Sorry but you're wrong, Flatpak has been around for longer than that, specifically at least 2014 and was known as xdg-app before https://github.com/alexlarsson/xdg-app/commit/a640cd365bd217...

And if you look at the history page of Flatpak, you'll see that the project has been in development in some form or another for roughly 20 years https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Flatpak's-History

tomkarho•34s ago

> which is effectively a rewrite of Flatpak based on what they’ve learned over the years, making use of modern technologies

My spidey sense is tingling towards Rust as to the language of this rewrite.

postepowanieadm•17m ago

Makes sense. BTW. are there efforts to migrate systemd to rust?

ElenaDaibunny•15m ago

At this point the Linux desktop stack has a harder systemd dependency than most people realize, Flatpak was one of the last holdouts.

pezgrande•14m ago

As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.

ramon156•11m ago

I wasn't there but from what I understood was that people didn't like the fact it was re-inventing an already-existing wheel. In the long run it was useful for some (at least for me it was).

nightfly•11m ago

People seem to think it tries and do too much. As a sysadmin I love systemd, especially way more than the init scripts it replaced

dockernod•8m ago

I unironically believe Docker is a great deal of a reason why it has freshly opinionated newcomers.

aniviacat•6m ago

The way it's structured (combining many previously separate utilities into one) hinders competition. That's tolerable while it's still one of the best solutions for the things it does, but will become an issue in the future.

theandrewbailey•1m ago

It violates the Unix philosophy of 'do only one thing and do it well', but personally, it has never been a problem for me.

I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot

nightfly•13m ago

> From what I understand from Vovk, they were intending to be “super considerate” of distributions and people not using systemd, which I take to mean we’d eventually end up in a situation very similar to systemd-logind, which was extracted from systemd into a separate daemon, elogind, so that distributions using other init systems could still make use of desktop environments depending on systemd-logind

tapoxi•38s ago

Seems reasonable to me, it's a rearchitecture to move things up to the systemd level where it makes sense for the majority of distributions but still allow alternative implementations.

I wouldn't recommend reading that comment thread, it immediately jumps into "this is fascism!" which is why it's hard to take people seriously sometimes.

nechuchelo•9m ago

While I think systemd is a great init system (as well as some other components under the systemd umbrella), I really dislike when components up in the stack hard-depend on it. We can't use GNOME, plasma-login-manager, and soon Flatpak without systemd.

Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.

danlitt•3m ago

FWIW GNOME can be used without systemd, and this is how Guix System does it. I think over time more and more components are depending on systemd, but at the current moment it is still feasible to swap them out for replacements that don't.

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