this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Everyone should just use the flatpak. You can get the latest version, latest Mesa, latest mangohud etc on any distro and it will all work exactly the same.
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. This is clearly the way for users who just wants their apps to work.
Because "users who just want their apps to work" is only a subset of "everyone" (and for them, yes, Flatpak is a reasonable solution to this kind of issue).
I'm part of a different and non-overlapping subset: if something doesn't work as advertised, that isn't acceptable. If there's a distro-native package and it won't install and run, then that's a bug and should be treated as such.
If you use "everyone" when you know that there are people out there who disagree with you, you should expect to get some flak.
Sounds to me like you would rather cry about Ubuntu-specific bugs and hope and wait they fix those bugs that break your program than use a distro-agnostic solution such as Flatpaks with zero such possibility of bug.
I think I can confidently say that everyone in the range of 4/4 users would rather not put up with bugs if they could avoid them and that 10/10 would prefer their programs to launch when they press the icon. Made up but it should be obvious.
That's where the comment is coming from. You still have your right of choice, doesn't mean that your individual choice is in line with other people's goals.
Brace yourself for the punchline: I don't even use Ubuntu, and what I said is not specific to any distro. Making sure that packages work, and work properly, is the single most important job a distro does.
Correct integration matters to me. Testing by someone trusted matters to me. I trust my distro's dev team to do those things. I do not trust people uploading Flatpaks for distribution to cover those things (even, or perhaps especially, if it's software they've developed—the number of blind spots developers can have about their own environments is terrifying). "Why does [preference X] not work inside this Flatpak?" is not an uncommon topic.
Anyway, I can confidently say that the number of users whose PCs have Windows on them and not Linux approaches 10/10 too. There's a reason argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy.
You are clearly wrong as Ubuntu disabling x32 apps here is what caused the problem. If a distro as big as Ubuntu could never be trusted to test Steam, what chance does your distro X have?
All this flies out of the window when it's your distro that's introducing the bugs as was the case here.
This is legit and I have to give you this. It's not perfect but to me, can't ever recall a time a workaround was not available. Most of the time, you'll find an issue like a plugin that is hardcoded to call to a library using the standard distro path or something like that.
But more users catch this stuff and share solutions to the Flatpak community.
Flatpak will probably be the official default format for non-open software in the future.
I've basically used Flatpak for every GUI application now just cause it usually works. People can dispute how efficient it is but I don't have the time to debug a bunch, what works, works.
Flatpak doesn't run the latest stuff typically. Like I'm on Mesa 23.1.4 on Flatpak and 23.1.6 on Fedora. Probably newer than what Ubuntu has though.
If you are installing the latest mesa, you want to use it when playing?
This is still a statement, even with the question mark