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Why does nobody maintain PPAs anymore?

When I first started using Linux 15 years ago (Ubuntu) , if there was some software you wanted that wasn’t in the distro’s repos you can probably bet that there was a PPA you could add to your system in order to get it.

Seems that nowadays this is basically dead. Some people provide appimage, snap or flatpak but these don’t integrate well into the system at all and don’t integrate with the system updater.

I use Spek for audio analysis and yesterday it told me I didn’t have permission to read a file, I a directory that I owned, that I definitely have permission to read. Took me ages to realise it was because Spek was a snap.

I get that these new package formats provide all the dependencies an app needs, but PPAs felt more centralised and integrated in terms of system updates and the system itself. Have they just fallen out of favour?

Frederic ,

I fixed all this by switching to MX Linux, no more ppa, no snap/flatpak, just good old .deb from repo.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

the only person i’d trust for ppas is ondřej surý

loudWaterEnjoyer ,
@loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

He almost had a key expiring.

Oisteink ,

A ppa is a repo. It’s Ubuntu stuff, and there’s no reason to work your ass off for Ubuntu for free. They’ll just shit on you and claim that snaps are great (they’re not)

possiblylinux127 ,

They probably want you to package your app as a snap. Oh snap!

christophski OP ,

Yeah I was referring to repos generally but I come from Ubuntu so PPA is the term I used incorrectly

iopq ,

I used ppas and then noticed the updates take forever and start failing as those ppas don’t exist anymore. I switched to NixOS to eliminate having to deal with this. NixOS packages perfectly integrate with your system and you can install almost anything you need, even networking software and other things that need root. For everything else you can package it yourself, and nixpkgs will accept your pull requests

possiblylinux127 ,

Nix is also a pain in the ass in some ways. Also it doesn’t seem to care about licensing.

I’ll just stick to Debian, Fedora and Linux Mint.

iopq ,

It literally doesn’t install non-free software until you manually configure it to do so. What do you mean by not caring about licensing?

fine_sandy_bottom ,

This seems as good a place as any to point out that I just perpetually have problems with flatpaks and snaps. Appimages less so but I wish they were better integrated.

Yes I understand why devs like these new packages. Yes I think that in the future they will be great. Yes they probably work fine for everyone else. I personally dislike them.

possiblylinux127 ,

It really depends on what you are using them for. I would avoid Snap as it is a mess but flatpaks are fairly similar to regular apps. The big difference is that the app configs are in home/var/local and Flatpaks use sandboxing.

hallettj ,
@hallettj@leminal.space avatar

When I was using Debian I found I could generally get the latest version of software I wanted from Nix if it wasn’t in the main Debian repos, or was outdated. Nix works quite well on any Linux distro - it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the system.

possiblylinux127 ,

Because we have Flatpak. Also everyone kind of dislikes Ubuntu now especially the more technical users who historically maintaining the PPAs

winterayars ,

All the PPA maintainers went to Arch.

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