Here's a Flatpak story: The other day, my best friend told me that he had switched to Linux! Arch Linux with KDE Plasma, a noble choice in my opinion. He's a smart guy, but he was having some issues that he couldn't figure out: Firefox' maximise and minimise buttons were missing, drag and drop from archives wasn't working, his selected theme wasn't applied everywhere, and many other small issues I can't remember now.
I tried reproducing his issues on my machine, but everything worked fine for me. We were confused. Is there missing libraries? We went through packages to find out what my system had that his didn't. It was weird, everything was kinda working, but the devil was always in the details, for every single app.
And then we found it: All those applications he had issues with were Flatpaks! He simply didn't pay attention when installing them through the Discover store. He didn't even know what Flatpak meant.
I helped him remove Flatpak from his system and install the system packages instead, and all issues were gone.
Man, Flatpaks suck. How does anyone prefer Flatpaks over system packages? How does anyone think this was a good idea? Stop trying to invent new things to solve old problems and instead go back and fix the problems.
Containers, Flatpak, Immutable distros, it's all wasted effort. There is no magical solution that will solve all our problems. The only way to solve all problems is by solving each problem individually one by one. And that is exactly what countless distribution and package maintainers are doing on your behalf every single day.
@fell You completely miss the point of Flaptaks and immutable systems (which you kinda already use if you have iOS or Android installed on your phone) because you didn't take the time to learn about why you can't just "fix the old problems".
@element For the sake of this discussion I glanced over the Arch Wiki page about Flatpak again. Specifically the troubleshooting section.
"There is no ideal way to apply system themes in flatpak apps"
"There is no single standard to set the cursor properly."
I find this unacceptable. The response to "Flatpak is not the future" is only giving me more reasons to avoid Flatpak, as it fails to defend the original arguments.
However, I do believe Flatpak can be a great way of distributing software, if - and only if - all apps and system components are Flatpaks. But at this point you might as well consider Flatpak it's own Linux distribution.
To me, the only use of Flatpak in its current state is more like an emulator. It's not really emulating anything, but it enables some applications to run that wouldn't otherwise run on the system, which is a common use case of emulators.
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