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.
This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.
what’s going on with Bottles?
Bottles Next, the successor of the current Bottles is in development. Of course it’s a Rust rewrite. 🤦♂️ The project has slowed down since then considerably.
Whats wrong with rust?
Not rust itself, it is a great language with lot of upsides. The problem is the rewirte part. A lot of projects underestimate the burden of rewriting your code from the ground up. A lot focus power on a “new and improved codebase” that is never finished while to old codebase isn’t properly supported anymore due to the focus on the rewrite. Rust is just notorious for these kind of rewrites as ist a fast and memory safe language where a lot of developers see advantages for their project (sometimes rightly so).
Heute nicht, Mann. Kein Bock auf den Scheiß.
they also got distracted by a project rolling their own distro instead of focusing on Bottles. same fate has befallen lutris
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
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If you’re shipping an out of date package with your own customizations then uses should at least be redirected towards your own bug tracking services instead of sending them to waste the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.
The issue seems to be mostly about the support overhead from really outdated versions still shipped to the public.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.