77 – Benevolent Dictators for Life?

Join hosts Bill, Charlie, Eric, and Majid in episode 77 of Linux OTC to unpack a heated Linux Mint vs GNOME Calendar dispute and what it means for how distros handle outdated packages. The hosts open with a personal detour into culture and identity before diving into the core issue: users on Linux Mint’s LTS base are hitting bugs already fixed upstream in GNOME Calendar, leaving developers and distro maintainers pointing fingers at each other. The conversation covers release cadence, the tension between stable branches and rolling releases, Flatpak’s growing role in desktop software, and whether desktop-integrated apps should ever ship via Flatpak at all. The second half turns to a Flatpak governance controversy involving a banned developer and a Flathub reviewer, sparking a wider debate about open-source project leadership and the case for a benevolent dictator for life. Charlie shares his first vibe-coding experiment building a Cinnamon Spices applet, and the group compares vulnerability-scanning results using Arcane and Trivy. They also revisit Arch Linux installers like EndeavourOS and Arch OS, discuss AUR helpers, and rank graphical package managers including KDE Discover, GNOME Software, and Bazaar. New episodes drop every two weeks — join the conversation on Matrix.