Maybe I was a bit unspecific here: The 32bit runtimes are there.

The 32bit runtimes are where, exactly? A major part I don't understand is how this is apparently a major burden for Fedora or Ubuntu devs to maintain in existence, but somehow automagical for Flatpaks. Like, do distros use much more primitive compiling techniques for some reason? To put it a different way, no doubt they exist today, but if Fedora and Ubuntu were to stop having them, at what point would Flathub or whoever be saying "man, these things are a pain to maintain, we should drop them"? Why is the effort different, and who in the Flatpak world has the workforce and motivation to put it in if it's being claimed to be too hard for major Linux distributions?

I don't understand how this argument supports your point of view at all. There is nobody to package these applications for any Linux distribution as well if they are closed source. What is the point here?

You don't really need to "package" them if the OS already supports them. But if they're closed, and you do need to package the application (which is what everyone has been talking about up to this point), you legally can't, or at least you can't then distribute it, so that's a problem.

What you seem to be suggesting is that you don't actually need to put the games in Flatpaks, but instead you have various game-running platformish applications which can package the needed stuff and run all the games. That's not as bad, but note that it's not what anyone had suggested. Over and over I was seeing people say put the things in Flatpaks--not, have Heroic or whatever bundle the needed libs. So what I'm seeing here is I've been saying solution X is bad, and you're coming back at me with "You fool! Solution Y is great, what are you talking about?"

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Well then that's really not a solution. So first of all, it involves massive duplication of effort. If every individual app is individually re-doing the work, then the maintenance the Fedora people don't want to do once would have to be done hundreds or thousands of times. That's insanely stupid.

But wait, it gets worse! Much of the point here is precisely about apps, such as old games, that people want to use but which are not maintained and furthermore are not open source. There is nobody to package them, let alone each do all this individual compiling of libraries. And it would probably be illegal for anybody to try. I suppose someone could make a Flatpak for a game without the actual game files, with instructions for people who own the game on how to stick the actual game files into the Flatpak. Sounds like just a marvelous approach! Not.

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I do worry that in much of the world Linux is gaining traction but not in the country of our future overlords.

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True. But this is the actual OS we're talking about here--it hasn't been a mostly-hobbyists project for a long time. People get paid to work on Linux.

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I'm quite suspicious of the new Nexus ownership. But this doesn't appear to be their fault. I'm sure something that is their fault will appear at some point.

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The issue here is not how the 32-bit software is distributed. Sandboxing it or not is irrelevant. The question is, who's going to maintain it? I don't see where Flatpak or any other such approach gives an answer to that question. Flatpaks have to get the libraries somewhere, why are so many people ignoring this?

The bottom line is, there are a lot of people using 32-bit software. Either the 32-bit versions of what that software needs in order to run have to be maintained, or some emulation thing needs to exist that creates the same result with less maintenance overhead. Putting stuff in a Flatpak neither maintains any libraries nor represents emulation. It is not relevant.

The alternative is to just not do it and pretend this is a defensible position. I don't think "but having my OS actually run software is hard and users who insist on it are being unrealistic" is a defensible technical position.

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@Stella Small open source projects tend to be very tricky to work with and be difficult to use, build and whatnot. This is going to be true in any OS, but they are much less common in Windows . . . small open source projects are usually Linux based. It has little to do with whether Linux is "viable as an application platform".

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This topic probably needed to be broached in one way or another. But this guy seems either foolish or insincere to me. He "wasn't expecting" the reaction he got, and it's just sooo unfortunate that people were mean to him? If he genuinely wasn't expecting it, he's an idiot, because it is completely obvious what the reaction was going to be, right down to it being exactly the same reaction Ubuntu got for exactly the same reasons a while ago. So OK, if that's the case then hopefully now he's learned something.

But if he really wanted reasoned responses that didn't take sides, he had an option. Rather than saying "I propose that we wholesale rip out this stuff a lot of people depend on", which is what he said, he could have said "Maintaining this stuff a lot of people depend on is difficult the way we do it, is there some way we could arrange for users to still be able to do what they want to do, but with less overall maintenance effort?"

But he didn't do that, so he got the response he asked for. His snidely bitching about it now seems disingenuous to me.

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This feels like that moment in the sandbox where you've finished building whatever the heck and you stomp through and destroy it.

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The first thing I thought was "Can you do Godzilla?" and I am pleased to see in the trailer that yes, you can!

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