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.
So one of the biggest problems Flatpaks solve is that you can have different versions of dependencies installed at the same time (in this particular case, it’s a problem, because the Nvidia drivers are huge). Imagine you have two packages, P1 and P2. Both depend on library L1, but P1 depends on the newest version, L1 2.0, while P2 depends on the last version, L1 1.0. If the package P2 is open source, you can just rename L1 1.0 to L1-1 and patch it, but if it’s not open source, you can’t patch it, and P1 and P2 can’t be installed at the same time.
It also saves developer time, because the OS devs don’t have to maintain a package for every single app that comes out for Linux. Instead, the app developers make one package with all the dependencies they need and the right version of each and push it up to Flathub, where it can be installed on every OS.