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Comment by BrightGlow | Hacker News Reader

I've read some of your old blog posts so I know where you're coming from, and I generally agree with your comment. However it seems they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Without using a stack like this, the app deployment story on Linux is absolutely atrocious, and would just get worse.

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I'd argue: whether using a stack like this or not, the app deployment story on Linux is absolutely atrocious. There are people in this thread who say they're never going to use Flatpak, some for valid technical reasons, others for more ideological reasons. And that remains the case, no however flawed you or I might think those reasons are.

So if an app developer wishes to reach those users, they can't rely on this stack to do it. You could ignore those users, sure, but at this point, why are you making a Linux application? It would be much more attractive to deploy on Windows or Mac. If you're trying to convince people to make Linux applications, you need to make it attractive and painless. But you can't solve social and cultural problems; problems of ideological differences, no matter how much you try to patch around it with new technology.

Those people are just vocal.

The rest of us like and appreciate flathub.

Linux audio really really needed a better story and pipewire and flathub have really changed that.

I think musicians will suddenly find they can have a reliable quick setup on most any distribution with just these two changes.

> Linux audio really really needed a better story

This is true

> pipewire and flathub have really changed that.

Pipewire sure did. Flathub only ate more of my storage, CPU and battery. I see no way that Flathub is responsible for "changing Linux audio", especially not even remotely on the scale that Pipewire did.

I've noticed a lot of smaller creativity/productivity apps are not available in distro repos. They're far too niche to get attention from distro packagers. However a lot of them are in Flathub and they work on any distro.

I find it curious you make that comparison about Pipewire because to me, Pipewire is just an incremental improvement for audio, not really changing anything on a giant scale. Most pro audio apps were already using Jack and got all the benefits of that type of system. Pipewire only makes it so they could connect to the odd Pulseaudio app, which is pretty rare. Not meaning to downplay it or anything. It is still a pretty good improvement, but its major contribution is what it does for video, not audio.

jack has been a consistent source of pain for musicians and people that need proaudio.

its great useful software but most folks don't have the skills to get it working without drama and breaking pulse etc.

Linux loses many independent minded folks over jack drama. It's a shame but this is a new day I think.

Pipewire gives a great out of box experience that should just work on whatever distribution they choose. That's not incremental improvement for people wanting proaudio.

I can't agree, ever since jack2 I actually never had any problem getting it to work with pulse. You may be thinking of jack1. Pipewire does make it easier to do this though.

PipeWire handles ALSA much, much better than jack ever did on any of my machines. Oh, and handling audio permissions via Unix groups made me want to rm -rf /

I don't know about alsa, I don't remember what happened when I tried that years ago. Yeah Unix permissions is bad, Pipewire is definitely better there. The security is a big improvement but I also wouldn't say that's anything revolutionary.

> the odd Pulseaudio app, which is pretty rare.

Unless you count Firefox?

Well I don't usually need to connect audio from Firefox directly into a DAW or synthesizer. And technically that could still be done with Jack, it's just a bit harder to do because you have to create additional pulseaudio sinks first.

I was just referring to the fact that it is no longer possible to run Firefox on ALSA without PA. And I only mentioned it because it annoys me.

You may want to try this project: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

But I don't recommend using only ALSA without a sound server on a desktop, the usability of it is pretty bad.

Apulse works for Firefox.

I have found ALSA useable, over many years. But I've never understood the config notation, so my configs have always been pretty cargo-cultish.

>I've noticed a lot of smaller creativity/productivity apps are not available in distro repos. They're far too niche to get attention from distro packagers.

That's what AUR is for.

Sure, but that's one distro.

Flatpak enables you to install Bitwig on any distro. A DAW on par with Ableton Live and an price of roughy 300 bucks, which is justified IMHO.

I'd rather use system repos anyways, because Flatpak doesn't have any of the plugins I want like CALF or Vital.

I don't know, I see a lot of smaller apps that are only deployed as Flatpaks or Snaps or whatever. It doesn't seem to make a difference to them that the audience is small.

(And to be honest, none of this stuff is exciting or new to me. It's just a re-packaging of the technology behind Docker but for desktop apps)

Edit: For LibreOffice it's likely that the project is popular enough that different people all contributed all those packaging options, so I don't think it's like a burden on them or anything. If something stops being maintained they'll just drop it.

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