Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

elementary is already moving in the right direction by trying to combine flatpak and AppCenter (=payments) -> https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-appcenter-flatpak/

From there it's not a huge jump to allow flatpaks that are closed source and/or not written with GTK, certainly more realistic than with non-sandboxed DEBs.

But as a former elementary user and micro-contributor, I also think that the App Store model has been a disaster for elementary OS. It means that developers who are perfectly capable of fixing the buggy stock apps are incentivized to instead start their own app and (fail to, presumably) get paid for it. Random example from a very prolific developer in the golden age of eOS 5:

https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.artemanufrij.play...

Now this app has been abandoned, and instead of taking over this developer's personal app, the next person who wants to write a music player will start another one. And so on.

If they got decently paid, by allowing proprietary apps, one of the competing apps could stick around by virtue of actually making money.

The ElementaryOS company would also get more cash, and could, (like Apple!) improve a core set of apps.

A "kernel" of good quality Linux apps could also spread to other distributions, and hopefully slowly coalesce around GTK and "ElementaryOS" style GUI as a de-facto standard. (Since the other distros are more accepting of jumbled GUI styles anyway, why not make your app on ElementaryOS first, and distribute that version on the other Linux versions, too.)

Anyway, the hurdle is not technical - flatpaks or no flatpaks. The hurdle is strategy and ideology.

I think that technical hurdles absolutely matter, even more so at the current scale of elementary. And offering apps that are neither sandboxed nor auditable sounds like a PR disaster waiting to happen once someone steals Bitcoin wallets.

Thankfully, the kernel of apps that work across distributions is slowly coming together over at flathub, which is planning to add payment support: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/680

Even the KDE-based Steam Deck, on the opposite end of every spectrum from elementary, embraces flatpak (and flathub).

It's exactly the piece of the puzzle that would have enabled what you suggest: write elementary-flavored apps, sell them everywhere. Given that elementary has already added the Sideload app, I'm not sure if they're as ideological about GTK FOSS purity as it sometimes seems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com