this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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No, you don't. Containers are the endgame of a bunch of dumb people saying "I don't like apt, so I'm going to make my own and it'll be better in my own distro", and now we have a hundred incompatible alternatives that are worse than apt, and no one knows how to deploy for all of them, so they give up and make a container.
Even if everyone agreed on Apt as the standard package format, wouldn't you still need to create multiple packages for the various different versions of libraries each distro will still have depending on their release cycle? As far as I know, it can be done theoretically, but since libraries can often break ABI, it's safer to bundle all dependencies, but then you're not far off from an appimage in practice.
Also, what are your thoughts on Richard Brown's (of opensuse) talk on Flatpak, who was a prominent hater of containerized apps.
if it's not in my distro or I can't compile it withing my distro's packages, I'm not installing it. I don't want the same library in ten versions.
Flatpak shares libraries, so there are no duplicates of the same version, though there may be duplicates of other versions, as that would ensure compatibility with the specific app.
App image does not share libraries between apps, so it would potentially have more duplicates.
yeah, that's what I meant, multiple versions of the same thing, which always turn out to be 200-500MB packages like chromium/electron.