> Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak Yayy!!! > And to focus their efforts exclusively on deb, Yayyy!!! > and snap. ... oh. Honestly I avoid flatpak/snap/etc like the plague. Every time I've used them, some sort of device or file can't be accessed, or something isn't working. If I need anything that isn't covered by apt repositories, I just compile from source now, and have my own system for detecting updates…
Fundamentally they're a hack, don't work right, and often result in latent packaging problems that cause future release upgrades to explode. People then unfortunately attribute those failures to the distribution rather than the broken hacks they themselves installed from third parties.
It is fundamentally impossible for a third party deb to correctly declare the necessary metadata to avoid breakages on a future upgrade. In distribution packaging this kind of thing is dealt with in metadata provided by the distribution packages being upgraded to, but third party debs don't have that luxury, even when using a third party apt repository. For example, a "Breaks" metadata declaration can only declared from one direction, so if a newer distribution package Breaks a third party package, then it cannot be declared on the third party side so ends up just not getting declared, resulting in breakage.
So apt/deb only really works in the curated distribution model where all your software comes from the distribution.
This doesn't work when users want software newer than their distribution release, or want to install proprietary software that cannot be curated by a Free Software distribution.
Further, third party debs have root on your system, which is terrible for modern security. Installing software from third party sources which aren't sandboxed should really be unacceptable from a security perspective nowadays. For example: do you really want some game to have access to your online banking session? How secure is that game's development infrastructure that will stop a bad update from resulting in you losing money?
On the other hand Snaps and Flatpaks actually provide app sandboxing.
That's the use case for these packaging formats. If you don't need them yourself, then that's fine. But it's disingenuous to declare that there's no need for them.