Free desktop application distribution and installation

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 16 December 2014 at 02:40, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:

> I agree, and I'm currently working on one (as are others obviously as
> seen in this thread) within Gnome (although the base code is desktop
> independent)
>

Thanks - I think the more people there are trying to address this, the more
likely someone will hit on a working solution.

Please do make as much of it as possible desktop independent, and if
possible, avoid badging this as a way to install 'GNOME applications'.
No-one's about to win the free desktop wars, and if we end up with separate
application systems for GNOME, Unity, KDE, etc., none of them are going to
get much traction with third party application creators.

Mattias:
> That is a problem with the distributions. Is it not
> best if the distributions try to fix this?

For the most part, distributions have shown very little interest or ability
to fix this. Credit where credit is due, Ubuntu and Red Hat have at least
thought about this problem, but even when distros do try to address it,
application authors have to deal with different concepts and systems for
each distro, which takes up time and energy they could better spend on
improving their application.

Thomas
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