Flatpaks are good, especially compared to snap.

The future is atomic OS's like silverblue, which will make heavy use of things like flatpak.

IDK why you're being so rage baity. Its easy to avoid flatpaks if you dont like them. Only thing I've ever found as an obstacle was adding the binaries to my PATH so I can launch it with dmenu_run. Otherwise my package manager works well enough.

Bonus points: Write a PKGBUILD that installs flatpaks to /opt and symlink out binaries as needed.

I used them for some things, but other things still don't work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.

To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren't something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don't just break all the time. I'm not running untrusted software.

Basically no solution is perfect, but they don't need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn't to say they don't have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that "being designed from the ground up" to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever "cobbled together" thing we currently have and that isn't always the case. I'm specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for "cobbled together".

One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed "from the ground up" to do what they do. However, I don't make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.

A few reasons security people can have to hesitate on Flatpak:

• In comparison to sticking with strictly vetted repos from the big distros like Debian, RHEL, etc., using Flathub and other sources means normalizing installing software that isn't so strongly vetted. Flathub does at least have a review process but it's by necessity fairly lax.
• Bundling libraries with an application means you can still be vulnerable to an exploit in some library, even if your OS vendor has already rolled out the fix, because of using Flatpak software that still loads the vulnerable version. The freedesktop runtimes at least help limit the scope of this issue but don't eliminate it.
• The sandboxing isn't as secure as many users might expect, which can further encourage installing untrusted software.

By a typical home user's perspective this probably seems like nothing; in terms of security you're still usually better off with Flatpak than installing random AUR packages, adding random PPA repos, using AppImage programs, installing a bunch of Steam games, blindly building an unfamiliar project you cloned from github, or running bash scripts you find online. But in many contexts none of that is acceptable.

I'd take a well-maintained native package for my distro over a Flatpak, but sometimes, a Flatpak is just the the easiest way to get the latest version of an application working on Debian without too much tinkering - not always no tinkering, but better than nothing.

This is especially true of GIMP - Flatpak GIMP + Resynthesizer feels like the easiest way to experience GIMP these days. Same with OBS - although I have to weather the Flatpak directory structure, plugins otherwise feel easier to get working than the native package. The bundled runtimes are somewhat annoying, but I'm also not exactly hurting for storage at the moment - I could probaby do to put more of my 2 TB main SSD to use.

I usually just manage Flatpaks from the terminal, though I often have to refresh myself on application URLs. I somewhat wish one could set nicknames so they need not remember the full name.