On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 at 04:37, Erik P. Olsen <epodata@gmail.com> wrote:
What am I missing if I remove flatpak?

Apps that have the same versions and features across multiple distros, oddball apps that you would otherwise have to build from source, legacy apps using tools that are being removed from many distros (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1737933).   

In many fields, there are projects that involve individual researchers spread around the globe, working in different institutions with different linux distros and different update schedules.  Flatpaks provide a way for all members of a project to use a common version and configuration of key apps.   

Developers are a scarce resource for open source projects.  These days, much of the heavy lifting is done by people involved with large scale processing.   This has resulted in decisions that aren't welcomed by individuals with personal systems (systemd, homed), deprecation of older versions of popular tools (python2), and less attention to desktop apps and their supporting libraries that aren't widely used by the large-scale community.   You see this effect in the time it takes to deal with different bug reports.  Native ports of apps that aren't used in large-scale processing may be slow to appear and have reduced functionality due to messing support libraries.   

From an app developer's perspective, flatpaks reduce the headaches sorting out differences between distros and releases.   This means fewer bug reports of the form "your app works on distro A, but fails on distro B".

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George N. White III