Not to mention the need for a code signing certificate, which even in 2026 is a gigantic and expensive hassle to obtain.

You can spend weeks of effort and hundreds of dollars just to ship an installable hello world app these days. The MS store takes care of signing, but there are other trade-offs.

The entire desktop TTHW (time to installable hello world) story is horrible across the board:

- Win: Decent tech foundation for updates made insufferable by code signing requirements.

- Mac: No update story, cobble together a bunch of tools/scripts, notarize releases with Apple (not very onerous), hope you don't ship an update that crashes at launch because you broke your updater too.

- Linux: No consensus on how to package. Bob wants a .deb, Alice wants a snap. Flatpak seems to be winning overall. The best tool to smooth over Win/Mac installer headaches (Conveyor) doesn't support flatpak. Bummer.

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JodieBenitez 3 days ago | parent [-]

> No consensus on how to package. Bob wants a .deb,

Bob wants a deb. I give him a deb. Bob is not happy because I compiled the software with an incompatible glibc. I deploy a webapp for Bob. Alice gets to use it too.

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cogman10 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And then there's Gentoo just smuggly accepting fate and always rebuilding everything rather than trying to force compatibility with libraries.

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hacker_homie 2 days ago | parent [-]

Honestly it really has been nice down here in Gentoo, now they have bin packages it even use it on laptops.

I even use flatpaks for the stuff I don't want to build, everything just works most of the time.

there are only two versions of libc mine and the one you brought with you.

	▲	zenethian 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This kinda sounds like hell for low memory machines. RIP shared memory optimizations.

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PhilipRoman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bob wants a deb. I tell him to pound sand and give him a statically linked executable and pray that DNS works. If the software is still relevant in five years, some Debian maintainer will take an ancient version, convert it to use shared libraries, apply a dozen patches and give a .deb to Bob.