I love flatpak because I can develop, release, and ship my app without giving a damn about what dependencies a distro may or may not provide.
@brainblasted it should be not an application developer job to care about the distro's dependencies.
That is usually the distributions packagers job, when they consider an app interesting enough to be packaged.
@joao @brainblasted As a user, I agree @joao. I have cancelled Flatpak installs from GNOME Software because they were trying to reinstall all of KDE! That's quite silly. As an application developer, I agree with @brainblasted. We don't have a choice on Windows and macOS anyway, we have to package all dependencies ourselves. I think the Flatpak runtime concept may turn out to be a decent compromise between the conventional Linux distro model and the macOS/Windows model.
@joao @brainblasted Flatpak won't be a viable option for music applications until PipeWire is widely available, which will be happening in the next couple of months. We just spent a month getting our Windows dependencies building with vcpkg. I want to try using vcpkg for our Linux dependencies too with a Flatpak and get rid of our old Ubuntu PPA.
@joao @brainblasted We've taken over maintainership of an old library and now have to deal with packaging it for our PPA and Debian. I don't want to deal with that. Packaging a new library in vcpkg on the other hand is almost trivially easy. We'll be adding another new library that so far no other applications use in the following application release which we'll also have to deal with.
@be @brainblasted On a personal effort not to be so negative about stuff:
What I do like about flatpak is incremental updates :D
@brainblasted
Also the flatpak logic which you just described comes at a cost of: the carzy amount runtimes GB in disk space "virtualizing" userspace, on top of userspace.
In my personal preferences, I find "not healthy", having to do stuff like:
Having to install 700 MB of runtimes to have _one_ QT app.
2GB of runtimes to build from source a 27MB application as flatpak.
Flatpak is built on the notion that disk space is bigger and cheaper by the year, and that is not that linear.