Before I was banned from Libera, I got a joke in with the SeaMonkey developers.
I was joking about how we needed to “modernize” by turning SeaMonkey into a Flatpak that brings in every library the user already has on their system and half of GNOME, like all the other ones do.
(Note: SeaMonkey is a small team not affiliated with a corporation, so they don’t have to pretend to like Flatpak, and so they don’t.)
(Half of a particular version of GNOME. So it can join the other 11 or so.)
One reason I don’t like Flatpaks so much is that you end up with dependency soup and then your computer gets littered with a lot of libraries that nobody is even properly servicing.
This is like a Windows DLL Hell problem going back eons now, where you have a million and fifty seven thousand copies of the Microsoft Standard C Library or something. They’re all packaged with an application that is rotting. The auther dumps them into the directory with the Windows program.
The same author doesn’t give a flying fuck about your PC’s security, so he leaves the vulnerabilities open and never updates it, and even if he did it wouldn’t matter because there’s so many other applications doing that.
And this is just one small example with one common library.
Traditionally, Linux distributions share one library that gets serviced by the distribution, and so it doesn’t become thousands of variations of the same library spammed all over your computer with different holes.
It’s a real shame to see IBM Red Hat leading the way in undoing this and making Linux “Windows-Like” in yet another awful way.
The whole thing just reeks of my dad’s response in the 90s to my mom getting a podiatrist to fix an ingrown toenail on me.
“$400! For $400 I could take him in the bathroom and cut it out myself!”
Doing the cheapest laziest thing possible to maintain the system is indicative of nobody who works at Red Hat actually using Fedora.
I mentioned to Roy Schestowitz a couple years ago that Fedora KDE is maintained by people in Matrix.org who are using “Edge on Windows” and “Safari on Mac”.
One of them told me that they mainly just put it in Parallels. (A virtual machine for the Mac.)
So of course nobody knows what it’s doing anymore when you shut the laptop lid.
Maybe some day you can run Parallels as a WASM in Safari and then be a Fedora KDE developer in that.
Given that nobody at Red Hat takes Fedora seriously anymore and that they REALLY don’t care how KDE works, I’ve decided to evaluate possible replacements.
I’m starting with OpenSUSE. I plan to evaluate Leap and Tumbleweed on my older laptop while I make backups and prepare to leave Fedora.
Last night, I was very impressed by the professionalism of the installer and the improvements made to OpenSUSE’s system and administrative tools, and how well KDE ran on Leap 15.5 on my older Yoga 900 ISK2.
So far the situation is looking favorable but I also want to run Tumbleweed for a while and see how that goes. ⬆