The Future of Flatpak

If a packaging mechanism, respecting virtualisation had been capable of existing 30 years ago we'd have one. Now, given how the fracture lines run, we're fated to have three or more.

It's pythons virtual environment and pip-is-weak problem, magnified. It's homebrew or Mac ports or fink or pkgsrc.

Mechanisms designed after fork, are never fork neutral.

None of the common cross-distro packaging mechanisms have anything to do with virtualization. The core problem is software dependencies.

A mechanism which can bundle its dependencies into an isolated runtime means dependencies do not fate share except at the ABI to the underlying OS.

Virtualised container apps have simpler dependencies.