GNOME Boxes lead developer Felipe Borges has been overhauling the application with a major rewrite and today announced the new beta release. GNOME Boxes has migrated to using the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita. The new GNOME Boxes code can also handle installing Microsoft Windows 11 now without needing any manual workarounds for Secure Boot or TPM requirements.
The new GNOME Boxes code also introduces a VSOCK device for accessing VM contexts and other improvements. With the revamped GNOME Boxes, it’s also shifting to a Flatpak-first and only model for distributing of new GNOME Boxes releases.
I avoid Bottles out of principle because one of the devs doesn’t understand what open source means and harasses distros to remove older versions.
https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2345
Also referring to “inferior package manager” in that post.
Same dev harassed Mint for shipping Gnome Calendar in their repositories.
https://gitlab.com/linuxmint/pins/mint/gnome-calendar/-/work_items/1
The issue seems to be mostly about the support overhead from really outdated versions still shipped to the public. This seems to be a legitimate concern and why I avoid the distros in question myself.
The issue about “inferior” package managers is not that wrong as well. Version mismatches between dependencies is a big issue in development and why stuff like docker, nix and even atomic desktops are so successful.
I’m a big fan of the classical package managers, especially for my base system but the overhead on developers and packagers is definitely not negligible especially if they use pre release versions of dependencies like bottles did.
Lastly I completely get that you don’t like the tone, the mint/home calendar issue was, while I get the concern, a hard read
I’m not arguing any of that. Package maintainers are doing invisible and often thankless work. The way this person communicates really struck a cord.
Wow “the <insert distro here> users are too stupid to deserve my package”. What a dick take.
If you’re shipping an out of date package with your own customizations then uses should at least be redirected towards your own bug tracking services instead of sending them to waste the maintainers time on bugs that either have already been fixed or aren’t present without the tweaks applied by the distribution.
You can’t prevent people from using older versions. New versions need to be tested, by the time this process is finished, upstream already released a newer version.
If you use the talking point of “own customizations”, did you get that from the mint thread and did you read it through? Software should come as is, but in some cases devs work slower or have other priorities so I understand bugs get fixed some other way. The whole pipeline from dev to user isn’t as simple as you think.
I had read a blog post about this conflict a week or two ago (and I just pulled up an article by a gnome maintainer to refresh on details).
People are of course allowed to use older versions, but if a distribution, by policy, lags significantly (2-4 years) behind the normal release schedule of a piece of software it distributes, while at the same time leaving feedback pointed towards the original devs, it creates a completely unnecessary burden on the developers.
And regarding the “modifications”, it appears like mint had used the GTK4 library libAdapta instead of libAdwaita now several versions ahead of libAdapta. I don’t know how extensively this effects that app but the point is the user facing experience of the software is being modified by mint. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for the maintainers to take the responsibility of handling bug reports and such, even if it just acts as a filter for relevant bugs to be reported upstream.