Comments by "Gilad Barlev" (@GSBarlev) on "Stallman's Bizarre Take On Flatpaks u0026 Snaps" video.

  1. Ah, okay. Stallman actually has a valid point here, though I don't even think he realizes it. He's saying that Debian, Fedora and Arch play a vital role as gatekeepers who audit the software that's included, even in their nonfree repos. The reason PPAs and the AUR exist is that the distro maintainers (leaders in the free software movement) don't deem that software as an essential part of their experience. Stallman's concern is that the rise of Flatpaks means that people won't be installing the "Debian-approved" build of Blender or Firefox, but the developer-approved bundles, and that this will encourage bad habits. Audacity is a good example. They're FOSS, but they threw in telemetry on a whim, and there was little stopping the Flatpak version from immediately going out to users. To be clear: while I would agree with this stance if distros had all the staffing and funding in the world, they don't, and the amount of time and the effort spent reviewing and repackaging software across a dozen distros is squandering precious resources. I also think Flatpak's sandboxing-by-default and dependency isolation features more than outweigh this lack of review. Especially because, ultimately, these are our systems, we're going to install the software we want, and having to apt-add a PPA has never deterred me in the past.
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