Linux

There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I've learned how to use the terminal, it's so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.

There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that's actually a good thing because it'll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.

With Windows and Mac, there's a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there's always another distro people can move to, not to mention there's no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.

Personally I am okay with them actually. I use several on my system and having each app allowed to have different permissions is super useful.

But also I like things that are directly installed cause they seem just a tad faster performance wise.

IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.

Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.

I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.

I would be, but the promise is just broken. Let's say you want to do the new cool thing and run Bazzite on your console gaming PC on your TV. Now you also want to watch videos that are any normal format these days or (GASP) HEVC like you could on an XBox. You install flatpak VLC because it "just plays everything" in your experience. Your experience is ruptured for both VLC and flatpak now. Flatpaks run on system .so's actually sometimes and installing a Flatpak doesn't mean an app "just works" like Mac or Windows...

I like them as an option, there are some programs like Bottles or specific game launchers that work under flatpak better than the versions available via native package manager (with Bottles in particular, you can use various built-in sandbox features via flatpak which makes things a bit more secure), but it's also a bit of a pain because it's an additional package manager you have to update separately now, or tweak if things go wrong.

never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.

whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???

I don't like how so many distros ship with discover configured to install flatpaks by default. It's a huge newbie trap when you click "open file" and uh where are all my files?? You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn't work for some reason.

They always seem to have some critical limitation. Handbrake is too slow via flatpak to work. Flatpak Zoom had no camera access. Flatpak-only Zen browser can't use passkeys. Zen browser asks to be my default browser every time I open it, even though it is and I always say yes; is this a flatpak limitation? I don't know, and I'd prefer not to have to figure it out just for some theoretical benefits and more overhead.

Furniture? Integrated circuit packaging?

There are merits to using flatpaks. With flatseal application, you can fine-tune the permissions given to a certain flatpak application. The best thing is restricting internet usage.

I'm relatively new to Linux. I honestly don't see what the problem is.