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Adios Apt and Yum? Ubuntu's Snap Apps Are Coming To Distros Everywhere (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Ubuntu's "snappy" new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo among others. To install snap packages on non-Ubuntu distributions, Linux desktop and server users will have to first install the newly cross-platform snapd. This daemon verifies the integrity of snap packages, confines them into their own restricted space, and acts as a launcher. Instructions for creating snaps and installing snapd on a variety of distributions are available at this website. Snaps can exist on the same system as either deb or RPM packages. Snaps aren't the only new package manager for Linux distributions that aims to simplify installation of applications. There's also AppImage and OrbitalApps.
It's not a contradiction. A better way of putting it might be "more Unix and less Windows please".
It remains to be seen whether today's iteration of "yet another standard" is going to reduce the number of standards or just increase them (as is usually the case).
Also, dpkg and rpm are already widely supported. Moving to something new wipes out all of that progress. Churn for it's own sake in general does that.
We're not Microsoft. We can't burn something down and completely redo it every release like they do. We don't have the clout for people to put up with that kind of nonsense.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's no contradiction.
1) Systemd and GNOME 3 aren't the only "modern technologies" out there. They are among the most anti-UNIX-philosophy ones. There are other modern init systems and desktop environments that do follow the UNIX philosophy, we just see the major distros treat them as second-class citizens, although they're typically superior to systemd and GNOME 3.
2) The point of using a mainstream distro is to get access to the wide community support network and the benefits it brings, including more testing of releases and quicker bug/security fixes.
3) The whole point of using a Linux distro is to avoid having to roll your own! In the past there used to be choice among the major distros. Debian is what you used when you wanted a system that worked. SuSE is where you went if you liked KDE. Ubuntu is where you went if you wanted a Windows-like experience. Fedora is where you went if you wanted to subject yourself to Red Hat-produced shit.
I know you're intentionally ignoring the real problem here: the fact that the major Linux distros have converged to the point where they're nearly identical. Worst of all, they've chosen to converge on software that exhibits a very anti-UNIX approach, such as systemd and GNOME 3.
Today, a modern Linux distro installation is closer to Windows than it is to anything resembling UNIX. The Linux userland has become a cheap imitation of Windows in so many ways, from the GUI down to the init and service management systems.
Disclaimer: I've been using Gentoo since 2002/2003.
I agree that Gentoo's build process is cumbersome, especially on slower processors. This is a lot less of an issue now as compared to when I started using it in '02/'03, when I probably had five-year-old hardware then. Larger packages like Firefox and LibreOffice have always had a binary package to install. (On my 2002-era machine libreoffice would take something like 9 hours to compile.) My machine now, which is around 8 years old compiles this same package in a bit over an hour.
However, Gentoo also has another huge benefit, and that is customizing packages to your needs using USE flags. These toggle build-time options, so as an example, when heartbleed came out I was able to remove the offending tls heartbeat component using a USE flag and rebuild the package until a fix was made available.
Another thing I've discovered is if you have similar hardware and similar configurations you can tell portage to build binary packages. If you share this directory via nfs export you can instruct portage to favour binary packages when all use flags and other build-environment options are the same. This has saved my poor celerons on my MythTV frontends quite some compile time.