When I first started using Linux 15 years ago (Ubuntu) , if there was some software you wanted that wasn’t in the distro’s repos you can probably bet that there was a PPA you could add to your system in order to get it.
Seems that nowadays this is basically dead. Some people provide appimage, snap or flatpak but these don’t integrate well into the system at all and don’t integrate with the system updater.
I use Spek for audio analysis and yesterday it told me I didn’t have permission to read a file, I a directory that I owned, that I definitely have permission to read. Took me ages to realise it was because Spek was a snap.
I get that these new package formats provide all the dependencies an app needs, but PPAs felt more centralised and integrated in terms of system updates and the system itself. Have they just fallen out of favour?
Probably because PPAs only work on Ubuntu and there are more Linux distros and even then it meant having to build and test a package for a couple of different Ubuntu versions.
Also, Ubuntu is moving towards using snaps for everything so they’re pretty much the successor to PPAs.
Until they drop it for flatpak as they did all NIH-driven products.
I doubt they will. Anyway I think they have experienced a massive community brain drain at this point. People packed up there files and left.
PPAs work for all Debian based distros, no?
Theoretically they can, in practice it’s less than ideal. And that doesn’t solve all the other distros or the combinatory explosion of supporting several distros and versions.
Flatpaks on the other hand give you a single runtime of your choice to worry about (though they still have lots of cons too).
Oh I’m not defending PPAs at all, I’m glad we’ve moved past them, I just thought it was a Debian tech that got boosted by Ubuntu. I see I was in error. Thanks for clarifying!
Debian focuses on stability. They tell you not to add any extra repos ever as it introduces untested software.
Encouraging something and disabling something are two different things. They have Flatpak in stable, which is untested software. That’s not why they didn’t use PPAs.
And Ubuntu derivates like Mint and many others, that’s actually a big market in Ubuntu terms
But you have no way of knowing if a PPA will break Mint, Ubuntu or what ever else.