I know there are ways to install software outside of aptitude on debian/ubuntu, (add repo, or build, or download binary, or possibly flatpak/snap/etc).

But being able to download *.deb files was one of the nicest aspect of using a debian based distros and now I’m seeing more and more projects include all distros except deb files.

Someone correct me but I vaguely recall that distributing debs is no longer recommended by debian itself?

  1. Am I wrong, and have I only co-incidentally stumbled on projects that don’t distribute debs?
  2. I am right and this seems like a mis-step, removing one of the most beginner friendly features that helped propagate debian based distros?

Flamesuit on.

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moeEnglish
    81·
    2 years ago

    Flatpak do share libraries, thats what gtk and kde platform flatpaks are. Flatpaks are designed around average GUI bound users. So concerns of using a few dozen megs of libraries for their multi-gig electron apps aren’t really relavent.

    Flatpak has really brought to light the question of whether its a distro’s, or a developer’s responsibility to create packages. I personally believe it should be the distro. Devs should be making good software, and if they want to provide a package, then great, but I never have an expectation from any dev of more than source + build instructions. Even a precompiled binary is not an expectation, because then you have glibc vs musl vs windows vs *bsd, and debian stable uses an older version thats maybe not compatable, or maybe arch is too new and doesn’t work yet, and it just goes back to the packaging expectation. So packages of any kind directly from a developer is a courtesy. If you want more packages in a distros repo, that they are building and maintaining, then they should be the ones you levy your complaints.