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i avoided flatpacks before.
but now that i tried out silverblue and had to rely heavily on them,
i have to admit that flatpacks are not nearly as bad as i thought.
the only issues i encountered are with steam (might not start propperly on first launch)
and with ides(terminal starts inside the sandbox)
other than that it works great.
Flatpak and Snap definitely make installation more simple. The packages come with their own dependencies so you have way less issues with conflicting dependencies. I like them when they are officially supported by the distribution or developer, but I prefer the official installations over supporting a random person making a package (not sure if this is a thing with Flatpak, but with Snaps that was definitely a thing).
Some software really benefits from not begin inside flatpak though, I had to switch back to the deb version of Visual Studio Code as the integrated console didn't have access to some software outside the package and was also logging weird errors.
I think that is what is pretty cool about them, that you can have both versions with no problems. Also, of course if the flatpak is giving me problems, I just uninstall it and use the package manager or something else.
I was using Flatpak and Toolbx exclusively until I discovered Nix. It's much better than using those two.
I prefered AppImages, but now that I'm on Nix, I've gone back to native. Native packages work well in the NixOS ecosystem.
For sure certain package managers are better than others, and NIX seems to be in a class of its own.
I don't know how much time I am willing to invest in NIX, or Guix for that scheme power, but I can do myself a favor experiment with a few VMs.
I use flatpaks mostly. Flatpak dependencies (runtimes) are stored separately from the host system so and don't bloat my system with unwanted libraries and binaries. App data and configs are stored separately and better organized. Everything runs in sanboxes. I use overrides extensively. All these are very convenient for me.
In place of snap OF COURSE.
I can state without any doubt that i had problems with 80% of the programs coming from snap..
For me the perfect example is GNOME Builder (I use KDE Plasma) but this package has it all. No, you dont need to download any dependencies, the sandbox handles it all!
Fun use case! It feels like hell experimenting with different DEs because the installs mess with each other. If only they were isolated somehow...
Definitely not me. I am on LiveUSB right now which makes my disk volume limited. And native packaging satisfies my needs (even when packages are old)