The future is statically linked and isolated applications. Distros need to adapt.
1. Have the users been asking for everything to be a laggy electron app? I don't think so.
2. Within these apps are languages based package managers that don't encorage vendoring, it's just one people go to package for distros that they vendor away. Distros do need to make it easier to automatically convert language-specific package manager apps.
The future is making development builds and production builds not wildly different, and both super incremental, so one can easily edit any dependency not matter how deep and then put their system back to together.
Again, I am fine with static linking. My distro, NixOS is actually great at that and I've helped work on it. But vendoring ruins everything. I hate waiting for everyone to build the same shit over and over again with no instrumentality, and I don't have time to reverse-engineer whatever special snowflake incremental dev build setup each package uses.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything, here, I'm just describing the facts on the ground. If you're not into them, that's fine!
But
- many people seem to like unified look and feel
- many people complain about per-app auto-update
- many people love to complain software is getting worse
Are these people connecting these complaints to the debate we're having? Probably not. Can these views be connected to that? Absolutely.
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I work on distros and due edit the root dependencies, I also contribute to many libraries I use at work during work, finally, I use the same distro at work on on my own and everything is packaged the same way. So yes, it's a "unified workflow for yak shaves" and I quite like it.
I hope there can be more people like me if this stuff weren't so obnoxiously difficult.
All else equal, sure. But they'll sacrifice that in a minute if it means elimination of other toil.
> many people complain about per-app auto-update
Facts not in evidence.
> many people love to complain software is getting worse
Okay.
> I work on distros...
Well, there you go.
> 1. Have the users been asking for everything to be a laggy electron app? I don't think so.
Humongous strawman. As if electon apps are the only ones that can be statically linked?!? For shame!
But that still doesn't make my comment a strawman (because I was talking about this one specific comment), or AFAICS yours less of one: Why would you jump to "bloated Electron apps"? Sure, they may suck, but the comment you replied to was about statically linked apps; no mention of Electron at all. Unless you're saying there was, originally, and had been edited out before I saw it? If not, your reply was... OK, more charitably, at least a non sequitur.
If not, please explain how, and I'll apologise.
Personally, for instance, I'd have been perfectly happy if at least a few apps had stayed with the Android UI of a few versions back[1], before they went all flat and gesture-based. There was no demand from me, as a consumer, to imitate Apple's UI.
___ [1]: And no, that's not outmoded "skeumorphism". That concept means "imitation of physical objects", like that shell on top of Windows that was a picture of a room, with a picture of a Rolodex on top of a dedktop etc etc. In the decades since ~1985 a separate visual grammar had developed, where a gray rounded rectangle with "highlights" on the upper and left edges, "shadows" on the lower and right edges, and text in the middle meant "button" in the sense of "click here to perform an action", not any more in the original skeumorphic sense of "this is a picture of a bit of a 1980s stereo receiver".