this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don't need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
Plus, developers can create their own repositories that can then be used on any distro.
Developers are exceptionally bad at packaging software though.
Still better than developers providing .tar.gz files or hosting an apt repo.
Depends, at least with the APT repo there is a chance they used lintian to avoid the worst mistakes.
So having 1 packaging format that works across distros is good.
Having run PostmarketOS on an old Samsung Galaxy tablet and now Arch on PineTab 2, Flatpak often works better than the native package manager. Especially with Wayland, many packages just work including touchscreen.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was "oh, you don't have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?" As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.