It’s thanks to user choice that we aren’t all stuck on proprietary operating systems, so saying that isn’t great.

Static binaries, or dynamic binaries whose project has documentation on what dependencies they need, are better than appimages. This is because appimages are a container with the actual files inside, creating a layer of abstraction, and appimages require libfuse to work.

Imagine the case in NixOS, where dynamically-linked binaries don’t work out of the box. You can patch or package these binaries, or just quickly use something like steam-run to emulate traditional Linux bin and lib paths, it works. With appimages, it won’t work unless you already have libfuse in your system, so you have to extract the appimage first.

Still, flatpaks as the only official alternative isn’t great for many reasons, and CLI/TUI programs are out of the equation. What is better is the devs distributing unpackaged binaries, jars, etc, and optionally flatpaks. Either way, Nix’s repository is huge so I don’t usually feel the need to run anything that isn’t a nix package.

Appimages come with the library dependencies, flatpaks come with that + multiple versions of the runtimes and drivers. Flatpaks make the most sense if all you use it’s that, otherwise you will have 5 different versions of mesa, gnome runtime, video codec libraries and other runtimes for little reason.

Looks like my mouse is supported, thanks I’ll try this out

I have a tendency to use “DIY” systems, basically systems that leave the administration up to me, and either have a minimal base or a customizable, powerful but convenient installer. Then comes the package manager’s strengths and weaknesses, and the package repository and its release cycles.

My favorite OSes of all are:

• NixOS
• FreeBSD
• Arch/Endeavour
• Debian
• To some extend Alpine

I never used Gentoo so I don’t classify it, but i believe I would like it a lot if I used it.

And yeah, I have a logo bias lmao. NixOS, FreeBSD and Debian have amazing logos. Something that is neat is when a distro has multiple kernel versions in the repository.

Java is a traditional and conservative language, which has its strong upsides, like the syntax being familiar to many people who haven’t used the language before. It’s a language that brought us the JVM, gave a job to many people and established fundamentals for other languages to inspire and improve on. If you don’t like Java, you can just use another language for the JVM, like Scala, Kotlin or Clojure.

Me explaining to my girlfriend (the voices in my head) about the brilliant magic of source-based packaging with binary cache

Except for video games, all software I use daily is open source and cross platform by now, but when college demanded for me to use Adobe software, I would boot my Win 10 VM. I also boot that VM to test if the software im developing works well on Windows. I also run my Logitech mouse software in a VM with USB passthrough.

Besides games, I think the only Windows program I run with wine is a tool to extract the BGM from the official Touhou games.

Before I had a 3DS, I would use a Windows tool on my VM to decrypt my totally legally acquired ROMs

You should check out Nix (the package manager). NixOS’s Nix package manager can be used outside its own system. It supports the vast majority of Linux operating systems as well as MacOS.

Nix’s package repository is gigantic like you wouldn’t believe, and Reaper is in it.