I agree with Linus Torvalds. Linux is too fragmented. This makes consistent software deployment and support expensive and far too varied. Maintaining documentation alone requires an unlimited number of distros. From a user’s perspective, I really think Linux needs a universal install method like .exe. No user should ever need to use the CLI install software, no matter their distribution. Radarr, for example, is a very popular home media server application. It is one-click install on Windows. It is fucked on Linux.
Flatpak as a software distribution solution already exists and is already widespread.
Now all we’re missing is the universal enforcement piece, which I think is non-trivial. It might take off organically but as per my example above, I’m not hopeful.
“Universal enforcement” meaning what? On its face your proposal sounds fundamentally antithetical to what linux is. It’s an open source environment, meaning literally anyone can create software and post it online. Are you wanting all directories to only accept flatpak? I don’t think that would go over well.
You highlight the issue: Linux users like it to be fragmented. So unless Valve forces consolidation, it will stay a mess, and it will continue to repel average users. If that’s what we want, cool. Let’s just stop calling every year the year of Linux, because that will never be the case.
Thanks to the likes of Proton, gaming on Linux is a hell of a lot better than it was ~5 years ago. You can actually do it now for the most part without to much fuss in my experience as long as you stick to Steam.
But once you leave Steam or get something brand new made by an EA type and have to lean on third party implementations of Proton or raw Wine to get things working it gets a lot worse.
But once you leave Steam […] it gets a lot worse
Heroic Games Launcher is pretty great for games from GOG and Epic. You can run games with Proton just fine.
Lutris is also a great option, actively contributing to it. Got a slightly different focus than Heroic, but a lot more features as well. Basically a one-stop shop once you got familiar with it. Really needs more people that can contribute though given the huge amount of platforms and launchers it attempts to cover (literally all of them).
I worry about Wayland for the features it drops from X11. Wayland will never have xdotool support, due to its security model. I worry about onscreen keyboards for drawing tablets and screen readers for the blind.
This is not true, ydotool already works and there’s nothing against that in the wayland design, it just works differently than x, not not at all
gnome is working on an accessibility protocol for wayland called newton, check it out.
ydotool is missing a lot of features. It emulates an input device, so it can only send inputs to the active window. xdotool can send keystrokes to non-active windows, and has features for searching for a window to send to. xdotool can minimize, dismiss, or move windows around.
I’m aware of newton. It’s a work in progress, though, and doesn’t have as many features as X11 accessibility has. Although it might have enough features eventually, I worry that X11 will be deprecated by operating system vendors before that.
kdotool can do all of those if you’re using KDE, but there is no universal solution, not yet.
