Haven’t seen the video, I’m only commenting based on the summary in the comments.

It’s good that flatpak is switching to OCI containers. Hopefully that will end the flatpak’s dependency hell. This week I was looking at flatpak as a way to publish my app and found the user experience (user is the app publisher in this context) quite bad. Could be skill issue obviously.

I thought I could just look into a database of flatpak runtimes, pick the one with the software I need, add additional packages and be done with it. Unfortunately it is not that simple. First of all as far as I know, there is no “database” like archlinux.org/packages. You have to download the runtime and then search /usr/include/ or /usr/bin/ to check if particular piece of software exists in it. Adding additional packages is also quite difficult. There are these runtime extensions which are like “baby runtimes” for special software like ffmpeg, java, etc. They kinda suffer from issues similar to the issues of the runtimes. And unlike in regular distros where you can get a package for almost anything, here you don’t have the luxury and have to bundle that not so popular dependency.

I hope that with OCI I will be able to just provide the binary, a link to the base image and a list of dependencies to install and be done with it.

Fair enough. I guess I imagined someone hosting all the selfhosted web apps that get posted to this forum, when most people likely just host only the few they need on the go, so it isn’t really that burdensome.

Edit: Forgot to add: I always though that it could be useful to just set up Apache Guacamole, so that instead of the hosted services, my family members could just use remote desktop apps but I never got around to it.

Yep my thoughts. New selfhosters think the hard part of selfhosting is command line but that’s “kinda” like thinking that the hard part of math is writing numbers on paper. Terminal is just the medium, not the complex part. Navigating filesystem and editing files is easier on the desktop but changing permissions and managing services would be be extremely difficult for a newbie without using the terminal because (almost) every online tutorial uses terminal. OP would have to learn how to translate the terminal command to its desktop counterpart at which point they might as well use the terminal.

OP also has an XY problem. They asked for a system which does not require terminal usage but they should have actually asked for an easy to set up system. People are recommending things like Yunohost though, so it’s fine in the end.

It’s nice there’s a front end for all these tools but I kinda don’t get why is everything “hosted”. This could have just been a desktop app. I guess it can be useful when you want to convert something on your phone but to me it just seems like unnecessary server maintenance burden.