Ive just gone to update my flatpak. I now have to download 7 slightly different versions of nvidia drivers. 7 Fucking times the same Nvidia driver. 7. 7 Goddamn times.
And no, I dont want to hear your excuses for this. I dont care if it only downloads 370 Mbs instead of 371.
Flatpak is not just an alternative packaging format. One of the key advantages is that it provides a predictable runtime environment that is independent from the rest of the system. Sometimes an application needs a particular version of a dependency (called dependency pinning, very common practice in development) and can’t rely on the system having the correct files. It also isolates the application from issues stemming from environment variables and the “global” filesystem.
It also gives developers greater control over packaging. Because of this isolation, they don’t have to rely on downstream packagers to manually adapt the software to the distro’s available packages (potentially introducing bugs).
One infamous example is Bottles. The project is officially distributed as flatpak, but OpenSUSE wanted to distribute it as native binaries. They had to use an outdated, broken version and caused a flood of user reports for issues that were not Bottles’ fault. More in this thread and open letter: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/pull/3583