[systemd-devel] How is desktop container getting along?

[David Timothy Strauss]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Leslie Zhai <xiangzhai83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> But there are only lots of use cases about Linux Server and web application,
> as a Linux desktop geek, I often consider about the disadvantage of
> traditional deployment of Linux desktop application. Krita, for example, an
> awesome digital painting application in KDE`s calligra suite, is depend on
> Qt4, kdepimlibs 4.6.0, kdelibs4 and sort of KDE4 relative libraries; but
> also as a KDE develop, my desktop environment is Qt5 and KF5, so I have to
> git clone KDE4 relative libraries` repositories, then built them by myself
> as what other Linux geeks often experienced

Desktop containers are not that far along, at least in the sense of
seeing any major distribution on the verge of installing applications
via containers. Even if/when it happens, it may not be the panacea for
dependencies you're expecting.

First, there are multiple ways to install different library versions
simultaneously without containers. Distributions regularly do this for
things like GTK2 and GTK3. Have you checked with your distribution?

Second, you don't need containers to package an application with its
own libraries. Distributions usually frown on packaging shared
libraries with an application. What you're suggesting for containers
wouldn't be any better than packaging to /opt/krita with all libraries
in the same directory, which is what some apps have done for years.

Finally, your desktop can only support a fixed set of graphical APIs.
Unless you render the application in the container and connect with
something like SPICE (which wouldn't be that great), containers won't
allow you to run arbitrary applications.