Matt Miller, Project Leader of #Fedora, gives a nice overview of what makes #distros valuable. This applies to any distro that actually reviews the packages that they ship, including #FDroid #Debian etc. Something like #Flathub or #Obtainium do not behave like distros because they do not aim to review and standardize the packages they ship.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=oKP1hgdFJKo&t=187
(You can click "Watch on YouTube" from that site if you like that kind of thing 😉)
@mattdm it is great to have more resources explaining the value of distros. It feels like it is cool right now to talk about eliminating distros and going straight to the upstream. There are so many valuable things that approach leaves out. Do you know of any other good resources out there that explain the value of distros?
This was an interesting post recently from the folks at Chainguard https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/well-that-escalated-quickly-zero-cves-lots-of-vendors
@mattdm thanks, that was a good read. It mirrors a lot of things we've been doing at @fdroidorg Basically, we're working on being the "distro" for the Android ecosystem, and providing a from-source, reviewed and integrated set of apps.
It sounds like you're not aware, that flathub basically is a distro? E.g. the platform works like one?
> And developers love being able to do whatever the fuck they want, so they did a lot of it.
That's exactly where flatpak blocks. Distros themselves only block this, if they are lucky and for some reason are actually reading code.
@razze @mattdm @fdroidorg I am aware that Flathub acts like a distro. I am a user and supporter of Flathub. The problem I see with It is that not a very clear story of what the standards are. For some packages, they seem reviewed and clearly enforced, and others, not at all.
I should clarify that I do see the difference between Flathub and Obtainium. There is a continuum of distro-like behavior. Fedora/Debian are on one side, Obtainium on the other. Flathub seems to be somewhere in the middle
@eighthave @mattdm @fdroidorg initial review is always enforced, but some apps might predate quality improvements, sandbox changes are always reviewed and linter is the other angle that catches a lot of stuff