My bad, I didn’t emphasize the Your-way-is-perfectly-fine-part at all and focused more on underlining how it doesn’t work for everyone which made it look like I was completely opposed to you.

I wanted to say that both ways, flatpak/snap/appimage and self packaging / user repos are perfectly fine in their ways. The first may be more targeted towards newbies and people who do not want to hassle around with dependencies and the latter is for the more experimental kind of person.

If it works for you and you are happy then there is no reason to change anything. Having the freedom to decide how our OS should be is what drove most of us to Linux in the first place.

In that regard I fully agree with you and especially with “Do what you want, this is just my personal preference.”

This may be true from your perspective but won’t sway over many newbies / plebs who don’t have the knowledge (yet) or who simply do not have or want to take the time for self packaging.

And flatpak, snap and appimage tend to become the standard to get verified, tried and tested software hosted & supported by the official maintainers or the company behind the software.

Now to the personal part:

There was a time when I was motivated enough to get packages from user repos - I actually never was motivated enough to do self packaging so maybe I have missed something world changing - but I got so tired of having to figure out the missing “optional” dependencies that meant the software wasn’t working as expected and having to trust 3rd party maintainers when most stuff on flathub was “install & ready” and officially supported or at least hosted by a “verified” source. And maybe distro xyz has a mindblowing solution to all my problems but for the moment I am happy with what I have and not looking for yet another distrohopping and yet another point was whilst distrohopping it was soo easy that I could use the same install.sh containing all my favourite flatpak apps & the “applications” folder containing my favourite appimages no matter if I was on a Debian, RedHat, Arch, … based distribution.

I am wondering, what is enjoyable about Windows/Microsoft?

The slow & buggy UI?

The blue screens due to crappy drivers or bc they fucked something up?

The way they erase any customisability, essentially forcing their users to adapt their vision of how a computer should be operated?

How they are coming up with great ideas such as taking system snapshots and having AI analyze them?

The updates that randomly decide to install and then take an eternity with the end user not being able to use their PC whilst an update is taking place?

The 10.000 different ways of updating software?

How they are blatantly ripping off features whilst marketing them as their own ideas?

The way they are turning it more and more into an advertising platform for their own products?

The $139.00 license fee for everything I just mentioned?

Like, the only enjoyable thing I can think of is software availability but thanks to WINE / Proton this advantage is becoming less and less relevant.

Flatpak was designed to be decentralised, Flathub is just the main repository offering flatpaks and yes, probably 99% of all Flatpak applications are downloaded via the main repo but it is technically possible to just launch your own if you are unhappy with the main repo. The Flatpak team literally has this info page for hosting a repository

I for example, am taking AAGL from their own flatpak repo because they are not offering their launcher via the main one (even tho they also tell you to link the main repo - I guess for dependency reasons - but theoretically you could open your own repo and throw all dependency related packages in there or am I getting something wrong here)