The Future of Flatpak

Years ago, I wrote an on-screen display (OSD) in Java for showing keypresses and mouse clicks[1]. Someone thought a flatpack would be useful[2]. I didn't see the point. It meant: (a) maintaining two installation processes; (b) collating download stats from two sources; (c) trusting a third-party system to maintain package indexes over time[3]; (d) adding yet another package manager to a system that already has a package manager; and (e) bloating the repo with another repo.

Years later, I still only see drawbacks.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KmCaster

[2]: https://github.com/flathub/com.whitemagicsoftware.kmcaster

[3]: https://flathub.org/apps/search?q=kmcaster - whoops!

The upsides would be

- Easy use on immutable distros - The user doesn't have to make sure they have the right version of Java installed - Auto-updates even if there is no repo for your specific distro

And also you can find it through searching on Flathub I guess

> And also you can find it through searching on Flathub I guess

Did you click the third link I posted, which searches Flathub for KmCaster only to come up dry? This was point (c): You have to trust that their search engine is correct, maintained, and updated. That doesn't come for free, it takes effort, and things go wrong.