I actually like Flatpaks... I use dpkg/apt-get for system packages that cannot be installed in userspace, and flatpaks for desktop apps / games. Many distro's have unified ways to update them anyway (at least VanillaOS has)
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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What?! No! How could this have been Linux's "killer feature"?
Am I taking crazy pills? It really matters to you that you can use a single command to upgrade your system?
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I can still do that, because I understood that problem when it arose.
On Arch Linux I've migrated away from Flatpaks, so I only use AUR and official repos.
Oh boy my updates speed increased like 3 to 5 times. Flatpak is slow as fuck.
Also my ISP is slow as fuck.
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On Mint everything updates automatically for me, Flatpaks and all.
Check out Nix, which goes in the opposite direction. There isn't really a distinction between the system and applications.
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you could use topgrade to update, and it will generally update with every package manager available.
This is why I really like KDE Plasma's discover. It's got integrations with apt, snap, Flatpack, and rpm, and that's only the ones I've tried so far.
I don't really use discover itself to manage my packages, cause for some reason I prefer to do it with the cli tools, but it is a great update notifier.
Except it doesn't always work. I've seen it stuck and loading updates forever a few times, while a simple flatpak update command did the job with zero issues.
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This is one of the reasons i don't use flatpaks, snaps etc. I get everything either from the official repos or from the aur. Except balena etcher as it is the only thing i was unable to install via my aur helper and i couldn't be bothered to look into why as balena is not that important to me.
It is the ONLY package that isn't updated with my update command as i installed it via appimage
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I use fedora as well and I just update through the GUI. It's more stable that way and waiting until I turn off my computer for them to apply is not a big deal.
flatpaks are all updated at once, just like distro packages, so yeah you might need to commands, but that's still very different to having each application update itself (and the security hell implied by that)
Also I think pkcon can manage your updates across various backends (unless you are on Arch, where I think there are both technical & ideological objections to having a simple tool that just works)