With the Steam Frame and Steam Machine launching with SteamOS Linux this year, we’re going to again see a nice boost for Flatpaks and desktop Linux overall.
Linux has, historically, been quite messy when it comes to software distribution. We have various distribution-specific packaging formats like .deb (Debian / Ubuntu), .rpm (Fedora) and the list just goes on and on. Canonical also went their own way with Ubuntu for the likes of Snap, but the real winner is going to end up being Flatpak and the main Flathub store.
I really like Flatpak. Sure it uses extra disk space, but it works well, and doesn’t require admin to install
most software shouldn’t require admin to install tbh, like I install all my stuff to ~/.local/opt and ~/.local/bin and it works fine generally as long as it doesn’t need root for something. I do agree flatpak is nice for things that might need an isolated environment though, but for most of my stuff a local user based install works fine
well that depends on the… dependencies (heh) more than the program itself
AppImage works well too, I’ve been using Gear Lever for them