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.

The problem is that now you have to package for N distros. And the people who run the distro may not want to spend time on it, so you have to do it yourself.

It doesn't have to be gated by "the people who run the distro". I started packaging a few pieces of software for a distro I use because I wanted to use that software, and I don't "run" the distros in any capacity. Package maintainers aren't born that way, they become that way by volunteering, just like most everything in Linux.

If you don't have even one user willing to do that for the distro they use, you probably weren't going to have users on that distro anyway.