Packaging and Init Systems

tl;dr: the author is mad people are working to use the software in a way they see fit instead of turning Linux into Windows.

How much electrical and intellectual energy goes into recompiling the same damn application? Every single day. Think about what it costs us as a society for you to be recompiling every package you install on Gentoo. For every ridiculous declarative config you HAVE to make yourself on NixOS because you're somehow above just using the developer's build of the developer's application they provided to you.

Man, shut up. We as technologists are here to serve the users, of which we are a part of. As a user if it necessitates modifying the Nix derivation to make an application work like I want it to, I'll do so in my capacity as a developer. Interestingly I can't make Flatpak work as I'd like, because dumping all it's files in ~/.var is hardcoded behaviour. This may be the worst so-called thinkpiece I've read in a while

FWIW, Debian doesn't require the upstream to do anything; Debian packaging is done by volunteers working for the Debian organization.

But it's certainly true that your odds of getting your package into Debian increase if you have a nicely documented path to producing .deb packages, and even more so if they generally complly with existing policy.