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.
The issue seems to be mostly about the support overhead from really outdated versions still shipped to the public.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.