Now if only I could actually install it under Arch Linux. The AUR package pure-maps is broken (possibly other failures, but mapbox-gl-native fails to build, tries to download https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-... but gets a 404).

It’s on flatpak. No reason not to use that tbh.

Bleh, Flatpak. No thanks, I want a proper distribution, and I don’t have gigabytes of spare disk space anyway.

(I’ve never installed Flatpak before, but installed it just briefly to see what it would say, and it seems to want to download one gigabyte to install this—mostly KDE stuff—which is presumably compressed so that it’ll take even more disk space afterwards. Note that I think I might be overestimating its figure by up to about 350MB, as org.kde.Platform.Locale is “< 355.1 MB (partial)”, so maybe it only downloads the locale you’re using. Either way, my disk is close enough to full at present that I can’t really afford this stuff, even if I didn’t find things like Flatpak and Snap distasteful.)

It basically is a static distribution of an application.

The benefits are that, you don’t need to be on a specific version of anything to make this work properly.

For what it’s worth, flatpaks do share dependencies as much as possible. So that inflated size isn’t going to be replicated for each application.

Also, flatpak _is_ a proper distribution. It doesn’t really do anything fancy other than isolate the dependencies from other tools on your system.

I have over 4000 packages installed on my Arch Linux system. The only hiccups I have with dependencies are Python, Node, and a few Java projects.

Flatpak doesn't solve the dependency problem, it just kicks the can down the road.

We need better tools to package and deploy apps that's language and system agnostic, and an easy to use extension system to accommodate this.

My gripe is that it doesn’t solve the problem, just pushes it a layer away.

Nix is the first package manager that actually gives a proper solution, and it is just much much better and has no space overhead either.