Flatpak creator and lead developer Alexander Larsson of Red Hat has got the basics of Flatpak applications working under Microsoft Windows 10.
Before getting too excited, while he has the basics working, obviously there are some shortcuts involved. In particular, the Flatpak support requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/a.k.a. “Ubuntu Bash for Windows”) as well as needing to install a Win32 X11 Server.
I tried installing some snaps on WSL. Unfortunately snap requires snapd which requires systemd which doesn’t work under WSL.
Yeah, I find it kind of odd that the sandboxing that Ubuntu is pushing requires systemd, whilst the redhat preferred solution doesn’t.
> snap requires snapd which requires systemd
Yikes. I can’t wrap my head around how bad an idea that is. Every problem I’ve ever had with Linux not working properly on laptops, and even some servers, ultimately pointed to systemd. Using it as a base layer for app packaging is just doubling down on systemd’s flaky reputation.
At what point will it be more accurate to refer to GNU/systemd/Linux instead of just GNU/Linux? Seems like virtually nothing in the free software world can operate without it.