The diversity of Linux distributions is one of its strengths, but it can also be challenging for app and game development. Where do we need more standards? For example, package management, graphics APIs, or other aspects of the ecosystem? Would such increased standards encourage broader adoption of the Linux ecosystem by developers?

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    24 days ago

    Where app data is stored.

    ~/.local

    ~/.config

    ~/.var

    ~/.appname

    Sometimes more than one place for the same program

    Pick one and stop cluttering my home directory

    • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
      5·
      24 days ago

      Yea I like how a lot have moved to using .config but mozilla just moved out of there and now has a .mozilla folder outside of it… wtf… It is insanely sad.

      I have actually moved my entire “user home folder”… folders out of there just because it is so ugly and unorganized. I now use /home/user/userfolders/… all my stuff like documents / videos etc in here

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
      2·
      24 days ago

      This would also be nice for atomic distros, application space and system space could be separated in more cases.

    • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      24 days ago

      it’s pretty bad. steam for example has both
      ~/.steam and
      ~/.local/share/Steam
      for some reason. I’m just happy I moved to an impermanent setup for my PC, so I don’t need to worry something I temporarily install is going to clutter my home directory with garbage

      • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
        3·
        24 days ago

        that .steam is a bunch of symlinks to the .local one… which makes it even worse. they have also .steampid and .steampath.

        and even worse a bunch of games are starting to add them there too.

          • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
            3·
            23 days ago

            damn, of all the people you’d think those guys would actually have used the .local or .config =[

            I have 73 dot files in my home directory lmao

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      2·
      23 days ago

      There is a separate kernel which is being written entirely in rust from scratch that might interest you. I’m not sure if this is the main one https://github.com/asterinas/asterinas but it is the first one that came up when I searched.

      By the tone of your post you might just want to watch the world burn in which case I’d raise an issue in that repo saying “Rewrite in C++ for compatibility with wider variety of CPU archs” ;)

      • muusemuuse@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        23 days ago

        I’m of the opinion that a full rewrite in rust will eventually happen, but they need to be cautious and not risk alienating developers ala windows mobile so right now it’s still done in pieces. I’m also aware that many of the devs who sharpened their teeth on the kernel C code like it as it is, resist all change, and this causes lots of arguments.

        Looking at that link, I’m not liking the MPL.

  • TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyz
    5·
    24 days ago

    While all areas could benefit in terms of stability and ease of development from standadization, the whole system and each area would suffer in terms of creativity. There needs to be a balance. However, if I had to choose one thing, I’d say the package management. At the moment we have deb, rpm, pacman, flatpak, snap (the latter probably should not be considered as the server side is proprietary) and more from some niche distros. This makes is very difficult for small developers to offer their work to all/most users. Otherwise, I think it is a blessing having so many DEs, APIs, etc.

  • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
    3·
    24 days ago

    Each monitor should have its own framebuffer device rather than only one app controlling all monitors at any time and needing each app to implement its own multi-monitor support. I know fbdev is an inefficient, un-accelerated wrapper of the DRI, but it’s so easy to use!

    Want to draw something on a particular monitor? Write to its framebuffer file. Want to run multiple apps on multiple screens without needing your DE to launch everything? Give each app write access to a single fbdev. Want multi-seat support without needing multiple GPUs? Same thing.

    Right now, each GPU only gets 1 fbdev and it has the resolution of the smallest monitor plugged into that GPU. Its contents are then mirrored to every monitor, even though they all have their own framebuffers on a hardware level.

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
        2·
        23 days ago

        Yes and no. It would solve some problems, but because it has no (non-hacky) graphics acceleration, most DEs wouldn’t use it anyway. The biggest benefit would be from not having to use a DE in some circumstances where it’s currently required.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
    3·
    26 days ago

    At this point, package management is the main differentiating factor between distro (families). Personally, I’m vehemently opposed to erasing those differences.

    The “just use flatpak!” crowd is kind of correct when we’re talking solely about Linux newcomers, but if you are at all comfortable with light troubleshooting if/when something breaks, each package manager has something unique und useful to offer. Pacman and the AUR a a good example, but personally, you can wring nixpkgs Fron my cold dead hands.

    And so you will never get people to agree on one “standard” way of packaging, because doing your own thing is kind of the spirit of open source software.

    But even more importantly, this should not matter to developers. It’s not really their job to package the software, for reasons including that it’s just not reasonable to expect them to cater to all package managers. Let distro maintainers take care of that.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    3·
    25 days ago

    ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

    Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
    41·
    26 days ago

    One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

    A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

    Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      1·
      24 days ago

      I find the Darwin approach to dynamic linking too restrictive. Sometimes there needs to be a new release which is not backwards compatible or you end up with Windows weirdness. It is also too restrictive on volunteer developers giving their time to open source.

      At the same time, containerization where we throw every library - and the kitchen sink - at an executable to get it to run does not seem like progress to me. It’s like the meme where the dude is standing on a huge horizontal pile of ladders to look over a small wall.

      At the moment you can choose to use a distro which follows a particular approach to this problem; one which enthuses its developers, giving some guarantee of long term support. This free market of distros that we have at the moment is ideal in my opinion.

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      The term “dependency hell” reminds me of “DLL hell” Windows devs used to refer to. Something must have changed around 2000 because I remember an article announcing, “No more DLL hell.” but I don’t remember what the change was.

    • Ferk@lemmy.ml
      4·
      24 days ago

      interoperability == API standardization == API homogeneity

      standardization != monopolization

  • Mio@feddit.nu
    31·
    25 days ago

    Configuration gui standard. Usually there is a config file that I am suppose to edit as root and usually done in the terminal.

    There should be a general gui tool that read those files and obey another file with the rules. Lets say it is if you enable this feature then you can’t have this on at the same time. Or the number has to be between 1 and 5. Not more or less on the number. Basic validation. And run the program with --validation to let itself decide if it looks good or not.

      • Einar@lemm.eeOP
        2·
        25 days ago

        I agree. OpenSuse should set the standards in this.

        Tbf, they really need a designer to upgrade this visually a bit. It exudes its strong “Sys Admin only” vibes a bit much. In my opinion. 🙂

  • dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza
    42·
    25 days ago

    Generally speaking, Linux needs better binary compatibility.

    Currently, if you compile something, it’s usually dynamically linked against dozens of libraries that are present on your system, but if you give the executable to someone else with a different distro, they may not have those libraries or their version may be too old or incompatible.

    Statically linking programs is often impossible and generally discouraged, making software distribution a nightmare. Flatpak and similar systems made things easier, but it’s such a crap solution and basically involves having an entire separate OS installed in parallel, with its own problems like having a version of Mesa that’s too old for a new GPU and stuff like that. Applications must be able to be packaged with everything they need with them, there is no reason for dynamic linking to be so important in Linux these days.

    I’m not in favor of proprietary software, but better binary compatibility is a necessity for Linux to succeed, and I’m saying this as someone who’s been using Linux for over a decade and who refuses to install any proprietary software. Sometimes I find myself using apps and games in Wine even when a native version is available just to avoid the hassle of having to find and probably compile libobsoletecrap-5.so

    • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
      2·
      25 days ago

      What you described as the weakness, is actually what is strong of an open source system. If you compile a binary for a certain system, say Debian 10, and distribute the binary to someone who is also running a Debian 10 system, it is going to work flawlessly, and without overhead because the target system could get the dependency on their own.

      The lack of ability to run a binary which is for a different system, say Alpine, is as bad as those situations when you say you can’t run a Windows 10 binary on Windows 98. Alpine to Debian, is on the same level of that 10 to 98, they are practically different systems, only marked behind the same flag.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      25 days ago

      I don’t think static linking is that difficult. But for sure it’s discouraged, because I can’t easily replace a statically-linked library, in case of vulnerabilities, for example.

      You can always bundle the dynamic libs in your package and put the whole thing under /opt, if you don’t play well with others.

    • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
      2·
      25 days ago

      nix can deal with this kind of problem. Does take disk space if you’re going to have radically different deps for different apps. But you can 100% install firefox from 4 years ago and new firefox on the same system and they each have the deps they need.

    • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
      21·
      25 days ago

      You’ll never get perfect binary compatibility because different distros use different versions of libraries. Consider Debian and Arch which are at the opposite ends of the scale.

      • dblsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
        31·
        25 days ago

        And yet, ancient Windows binaries will still (mostly) run and macOS allows you to compile for older system version compatibility level to some extent (something glibc alone desperately needs!). This is definitely a solvable problem.

        Linus keeps saying “you never break userspace” wrt the kernel, but userspace breaks userspace all the time and all people say is that there’s no other way.

        • Magiilaro@feddit.org
          3·
          25 days ago

          It works under Windows because the windows binaries come with all their dependency .dll (and/or they need some ancient visual runtime installed).

          This is more or less the Flatpack way, with bundling all dependencies into the package

          Just use Linux the Linux way and install your program via the package manager (including Flatpack) and let that handle the dependencies.

          I run Linux for over 25 years now and had maybe a handful cases where the Userland did break and that was because I didn’t followed what I was told during package upgrade.

          The amount of time that I had to get out of .dll-hell on Windows on the other hand. The Linux way is better and way more stable.

          • dblsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
            22·
            25 days ago

            I’m primarily talking about Win32 API when I talk about Windows, and for Mac primarily Foundation/AppKit (Cocoa) and other system frameworks. What third-party libraries do or don’t do is their own thing.

            There’s also nothing wrong with bundling specialized dependencies in principle if you provide precompiled binaries. If it’s shipped via the system package manager, that can manage the library versions and in fact it should do that as far as possible. Where this does become a problem is when you start shipping stuff like entire GUI toolkits (hello bundled Qt which breaks Plasma’s style plugins every time because those are not ABI-compatible either).

            The amount of time that I had to get out of .dll-hell on Windows on the other hand. The Linux way is better and way more stable.

            Try running an old precompiled Linux game (say Unreal Tournament 2004 for example). They can be a pain to get working. This is not just some “ooooh gotcha” case, this is an important thing that’s missing for software preservation and cross-compatibility, because not everything can be compiled from source by distro packagers, and not every unmaintained open-source software can be compiled on modern systems (and porting it might not be easy because of the same problem).

            I suppose what Linux is severely lacking is a comprehensive upwards-compatible system API (such as Win32 or Cocoa) which reduces the churn between distros and between version releases. Something that is more than just libc.

            We could maybe have had this with GNUstep, for example (and it would have solved a bunch of other stuff too). But it looks like nobody cares about GNUstep and instead it seems like people are more interested in sidestepping the problem with questionably designed systems like Flatpak.

            • Magiilaro@feddit.org
              2·
              25 days ago

              Unreal Tournament 2004 depends on SDL 1.3 when I recall correctly, and SDL is neither on Linux nor on any other OS a core system library.

              Binary only programs are foreign to Linux, so yes you will get issues with integrating them. Linux works best when everyone plays by the same rules and for Linux that means sources available.

              Linux in its core is highly modifiable, besides the Kernel (and nowadays maybe systemd), there is no core system that could be used to define a API against. Linux on a Home theater PC has a different system then Linux on a Server then Linux on a gaming PC then Linux on a smartphone.

              You can boot the Kernel and a tiny shell as init and have a valid, but very limited, Linux system.

              Linux has its own set of rules and his own way to do things and trying to force it to be something else can not and will not work.

        • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
          1·
          25 days ago

          The difference is that most of your software is built for your distribution, the only exception being some proprietary shit that says it supports Linux, but in reality only supports Ubuntu. That’s my pet peeve just so that you know!

    • Sinfaen@beehaw.org
      1·
      18 days ago

      This.

      From the perspective of software preservation, we need this. Sometimes we won’t have the source, and just need it to work while also getting security updates.

      From the perspective of software delivery: read up on JangaFX’s recent article about this topic and the problems they run into delivering software in the present

    • iii@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      25 days ago

      I think webassembly will come out on top as preferred runtime because of this, and the sandboxing.

    • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
      01·
      25 days ago

      Statically linking is absolutely a tool we should use far more often, and one we should get better at supporting.

  • asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev
    21·
    25 days ago

    Flatpak with more improvements to size and sandboxing could be accepted as the standard packaging format in a few years. I think sandboxing is a very important factor as Linux distros become more popular.

    • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      25 days ago

      Flatpak is very useful for a lot of things, but i really dont think it should be the default. It still has some weird issues. For example if you run a seperate home and root partition flatpak by default will install things into your root partition which quickly fills up. You have to go in and do a bunch of work to get it to use the home partition.

      Or for example issues with themeing and cursors. Its a pretty common issue for flatpaks to not properly detect your cursor theme and just use the default until you mess around with perms and settings to fix it.

      They also generally get updates slower. I guess maybe if its adopted more that would change but flatpak is already pretty widely used and thats still an issue. Especially for smaller programs not used by as many people.

      Keeping it as just something that is good to use for the ones who like a GUI experience and want something simple and easy is great. But if we were to start doing like what ubuntu does with snaps where theyll just replace things you install with the snap version then im not in favor of that at all.

      • fxdave@lemmy.ml
        1·
        24 days ago

        I agree that flatpak is not there yet. The API is limited, and it is also hard to package an app. But I really want to see it succeed

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    43·
    24 days ago

    I’m not sure whether this should be a “standard”, but we need a Linux Distribution where the user never has to touch the command line. Such a distro would be beneficial and useful to new users, who don’t want to learn about command line commands.

    And also we need a good app store where users can download and install software in a reasonably safe and easy way.

    • RawrGuthlaf@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      8·
      24 days ago

      I really don’t understand this. I put a fairly popular Linux distro on my son’s computer and never needed to touch the command line. I update it by command line only because I think it’s easier.

      Sure, you may run into driver scenarios or things like that from time to time, but using supported hardware would never present that issue. And Windows has just as many random “gotchas”.

    • AugustWest@lemm.eeEnglish
      61·
      24 days ago

      Why do people keep saying this? If you don’t want to use the command line then don’t.

      But there is no good reason to say people shouldn’t. It’s always the best way to get across what needs to be done and have the person execute it.

      The fedora laptop I have been using for the past year has never needed the command line.

      On my desktop I use arch. I use the command line because I know it and it makes sense.

      Its sad people see it as a negative when it is really useful. But as of today you can get by without it.

        • AugustWest@lemm.eeEnglish
          41·
          23 days ago

          lose sight of their humanity

          Ok this is now a stupid conversation. Really? Humanity?

          Look, you can either follow a flowchart of a dozen different things to click on to get information about your thunderbolt device or type boltctl -list

          Do you want me to create screen shots of every step of the way to use a gui or just type 12 characters? That is why it is useful. It is easy to explain, easy to ask someone to do it. Then they can copy and paste a response, instead of yet another screenshot.

          Next thing you know you will be telling me it is against humanity to “right click”. Or maybe we all should just get a Mac Book Wheel

          Look, I am only advocating that it is a very useful tool. There is nothing “bad” about it, or even hard. What is the negative?

          But I also said, I have been using a Fedora laptop for over a year and guess what? I never needed the command line. Not once.

            • AugustWest@lemm.eeEnglish
              3·
              23 days ago

              You blocked me over a difference of opinion?

              Wow.

              All I am trying to say it that it is a tool in the toolbox. Telling people Linux needs it is not true, telling people it’s bad is not true.

              Quit trying to make it a negative. I would encourage anyone to explore how to use this tool. And when trying to communicate ideas on the internet it is a very useful one.

              I have never blocked anyone, I find that so strange. It’s like saying because of our difference on this issue, we could never have common ground on any other.

              And you ask me to remember my humanity?

    • elischeva@friendica.world
      1·
      17 days ago

      @gandalf_der_12te @original_reader

      Linux Mint and some Kind of Ubuntu-Flavour are the Goto. Preferably the LTS Vefsions. For Ubuntu its 24.04, for Mint it is 22. So you ever need the commandline only for one short line and only in 2029.

      So for the next few years you don’t need to touch the commandline.

  • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    25 days ago

    Stability and standardisation within the kernel for kernel modules. There are plenty of commercial products that use proprietary kernel modules that basically only work on a very specific kernel version, preventing upgrades.

    Or they could just open source and inline their garbage kernel modules…

  • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    25 days ago

    Not offering a solution here exactly, but as a software engineer and architect, this is not a Linux only problem. This problem exists across all software. There are very few applications that are fully self contained these days because it’s too complex to build everything from scratch every time. And a lot of software depends on the way that some poorly documented feature worked at the time that was actually a bug and was eventually fixed and then breaks the applications that depended on it, etc. Also, any time improvements are made in a library application it has potential to break your application, and most developers don’t get time to test the every newer version.

    The real solution would be better CI/CD build systems that automatically test the applications with newer versions of libraries and report dependencies better. But so many applications are short on automated unit and integration tests because it’s tedious and so many companies and younger developers consider it a waste of time/money. So it would only work in well maintained and managed open source types of applications really. But who has time for all that?

    Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot at my current job as an architect for a major corporation. I’ve had to do a lot of side work to get things even part of the way there. And I don’t have to deal with multiple OSes and architectures. But I think it’s an underserved area of software development and distribution that is just not “fun” enough to get much attention. I’d love to see it at all levels of software.