The end for Mandriva

Posted May 27, 2015 18:12 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: The end for Mandriva by josh
Parent article: The end for Mandriva

> GNOME Sandbox is more what I meant about upstream taking care of what distributions used to do.

Ah ok. Now that I understand your perspective better, I can highlight the direction this particular effort is moving towards to the extend I understand it.

* GNOME Software has support for abstracting out the differences between distro native packages and sandboxes apps
* Fedora workstation is looking into enabling more of this support out of the box. See
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-Ma...
* The exact line on what would be supplied by the distro vs shipped as sandboxes apps is a ongoing discussion. System runtime vs individual apps seems to be a natural fit. Support from third party vendors might move that needle further.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 27, 2015 18:36 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

I appreciate the extra info about GNOME Sandbox.

However, that was just one example of upstreams working on what would previously have been the work of a distribution. More generally, much of what a distribution would traditionally have done as "integration", such as making programs work together or use consistent appearances, has now been done in many upstream projects. Not perfectly, but to a degree that drastically reduces just how much distros need to do.

Similarly, Linux is much better about working with hardware out of the box, and many other pieces of software Just Work without needing changes.

There's still work for distributions to do, but it's much less than it used to be, and doing that work alone doesn't create something uniquely valuable.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 27, 2015 19:02 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"There's still work for distributions to do, but it's much less than it used to be, and doing that work alone doesn't create something uniquely valuable."

Possibly. Depending on how successful the sandbox stuff is adopted across distros, users might not care about where exactly there are getting the base runtime from. That is already true for containers and VM's to a good extend.