Linux

theyre whatever, they have their place in my system, but inprefer installing debs from the repo

I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.

To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.

Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".

One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.

That reminds me, is Flatpak packaging CLI tools already?

It just doesnt work half the time. I avoid them as much as possible.

Speaking of terminal emulators! - https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-emulation/

I like flatpak, but I can't download Flathub flatpak applications and (specially) Flathub flatpak runtimes from my phone. I hope Flathub learns from F-Droid

I am definitely a fan. A lot of people say that flatpaks are bad because of sandboxing but I haven't seemed to have any issues with it.

Although I do try to use dnf when a dnf package is available (I use fedora)

Flatpaks are pretty great for getting the latest software without having to have a cutting edge rolling release distro or installing special repos and making sure stuff doesn't break down the line.

I use Flatpaks for my software that I need the latest and greatest version of, and my distros native package for CLI apps and older software that I don't care about being super up to date.

My updater script handles all of it in one action anyways, so no biggie on that either.

Flatpaks are the best all-in-one solution when compared to Appimages or Snaps imo.

When I open my task manager I see flatpak-session-helper near the top of the list for ram usage and am suspicious

I've never had a problem with flatpaks or snaps.