The Future of Flatpak

I don't agree with him 100%, but I always find Drew DeVault to be thoughtful on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936114

https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....

Basically, he argues that application distribution outside of the distro (a la flatpak, snap, appimage) is just a bad model. The right model is the one distros have been using for years: You get software through the distro's package manager, and that software is packaged by people working on behalf of the distro. As he says: "Software distributions are often volunteer-run and represent the interests of the users; in a sense they are a kind of union of users."

The other issue, of course, is that in practice flatpaks/snaps/appimages never seem to 100% work as well as distro packages do.

I'm glad flaptaks are getting more adoption. Application distribution needs to move from distributions because they suck at it. Due to no fault of their own. Developers should have the option to distribute their apps without middlemen.

In fact I’d say they are perfect for distributions to be more stable. E.g. : my issue with Debian have always been that you couldn’t (easily, I know backports existed) have stable system AND fresh software. With Flatpack, you can.

Now I can run my latest user softwares on a stable distribution. That’s pretty cool.

There are still issues of UX. Especially when the app you are using doesn’t have enough permissions to do the job, you have no information about it and when you guess it by yourself, changing this is hard.

I’d expect that Flatpack should allow apps to specifically ask for permissions in real time or when they try to access external resources like in macOS : just expose the APIs but make them wait for user approval.