I agree that it is "yet another standard", but I gotta say that Flatpak is pretty sweet, and does actually do a good job of making "one package manager to rule them all".
I think part of the problem with a lot of "selling stuff on Linux" has been mucking around with different dependencies for the thousand different versions of Linux.
Historically, this has led to a couple solutions: either a) Just officially support one distro (usually Ubuntu), or b) just don't release a Linux version.
Flatpak has actually succeeded in making a system that kind of works everywhere, and I think it actually has a shot of being an equivalent to the Mac App Store.
Flatpak is actually made by the same groups of people who make these open source DEs, as well as the various open source stacks we use on the desktop, it’s had the advantage that it’s integration into the desktop is decent and quite cool (hello pipewire).
Regardless of your opinions of GNOME and KDE, it’s hard to argue Flatpak has anything but good intentions, it’s made by people who want the Linux desktop to be better
As a web developer currently working on a Debian laptop I don't know which software I would want to buy if I was using Windows or a Mac. Everything I was using for free to do this job with Windows in 2008 was also available on Linux for free, that's why I moved to Ubuntu in 2009. I never had to buy any software in all these years but maybe my use cases are pretty simple.
> and I think it actually has a shot of being an equivalent to the Mac App Store.
This I agree with, but not this:
> and does actually do a good job of making "one package manager to rule them all".
That's not its goal. There are no terminal apps in it, so everyone that wants to run custom packages from a terminal is still going to need something like apt/dnf/homebrew.
Is there an actual technical limitation or just because of the binary naming convention? I ask because some of the flatpak apps I have installed I almost always run via the command line by putting "/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin" in my path and aliasing to the long name, ie: "alias evince=org.gnome.Evince" and they seem to work fine.
Maybe I'm speaking a bit too broadly; at least in regards to GUI apps, it's been a pretty nice "unifying force" for me when I ran Linux (which has admittedly hasn't been a few years now).
I am reminded of that one game dev who dropped Linux support because 99% of their bug reports were coming from 1% of their total playerbase (read: the Linux crowd).
