Flatpak, Snap, appimage, etc...
I have pretty fastidiously avoided ever using any of the "package everything into the image" projects, and my life has been considerably better off.
All these things serve to do is make the developer experience easier, at the cost of delivering a much worse user experience.
I can't think of any reason a user would ever prefer packaged variant of something.
Because shipping the runtime with the software means you can get newer software on older distributions. It's also great for immutable/atomic systems where installing packages at the system level is an anti pattern.
> package everything into the image" projects
But Flatpak does not do this. It consists of runtimes that usually contain the most of what applications needed, and are updated separately from the application itself.
Yes, flatpak does do that; its base images only have the basics, leaving apps to bring the rest of their own libraries/dependencies.
that's not everything which was the original comment, the Freedesktop runtime is generally enough for 90% of applications.
It is better when you cannot get a package otherwise, so if you use a distro with a big repo, it happens mostly with proprietary software.
Most proprietary software ships as tgz files which you can just unpack and run.
A few ships with "installers", which are mostly just bash scripts with the tgz embedded.
Simple enough.
If you pretend dependencies don’t exist. Binaries aren’t portable.
Have you as a user never encountered dependency hell??
Who are you and how can we trade places?