I think history has shown that the fragmentation will decrease. It would increase if Ubuntu continued to focus on its walled garden and succeeded but Ubuntu is not good at that. They pushed upstart but the community went with systemd. They pushed Mir but the community went with Wayland. They pushed Unity but dropped it for Gnome. Maybe they do better with smaller contributions to existing projects but their attempts to drive the linux community has largely failed. On Mon, 2022-04-25 at 13:42 -0400, Joshua Stone via WLUG wrote:
Last week marked the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and so far it looks like some noteworthy improvements over the last LTS, notably Wayland being enabled for Intel/AMD users by default!
There is no Wayland enablement for Nvidia users in 22.04 LTS though, and Pulseaudio is still the default audio server instead of the more modern pipewire+wireplumber that's been appearing in other distributions. It also appears that Firefox in 22.04 LTS is now installed as a snap at the request of Mozilla, and it drops the deb package from the official repo.
Also interesting is that Ubuntu will continue to avoid supporting flatpak in favor of snap, as explained by Mark Shuttleworth:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/ubuntu-wont-support-flatpak-anytime-soon
I can say right now Flatpak’s wouldn’t work for us. I don’t think they have the security story and I also don’t think they have the ability to deliver the same integrity of execution over time that Snaps have ‘cos we built those things into Snaps
I like the fact that people have a diversity of opinions on ways to solve the problem […] but I also think we’re going to deliver a far better experience to developers and to users if we concentrate our efforts around something we really can move forward.
I respectfully disagree with Shuttlesworth's appraisal, because it seems to contradict the overall experience I've seen from open source projects that have a tendency to package flatpaks and appimages which in turn tend to be well-supported across many distributions.
While I understand that it's very easy to set up flatpak in Ubuntu these days, I'm still disappointed that this is the stance Ubuntu is taking because I feel that this doesn't quite align with the interests of the Linux community at large who're trying to improve the desktop experience.
I worry that the distribution that got me into Linux years ago will increase fragmentation as time goes on if it continues to focus on its walled garden approach. What do you think?
- Josh _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/GZEMSF...