I jumped ship from Ubuntu to fedora last year and fedora is awesome. Fedora has a bit newer packages and the default felt right (albeit I missed system tray plugin from Ubuntu). Some hardware work better OOTB on Ubuntu, so always try with a live distro first.
You can always download it as an extension instead of a system package for the extension, but yeah, it’s available on our repos.
Also, pretty good. It will likely never be as many packages as there are in Debian’s repos, but even without Flatpak there was never a package I couldn’t find either in our repos or on COPR.
I see @joojmachine already answered some of your questions, but regarding “why would hardware work differently on fedra”, I assume it has to do with what kernel is being shipped, and what drivers that is also shipped with the distro by default. Sometimes drivers aren’t shipped due to legal reasons, and a distro can be shipped with a kernel that dosen’t have certain support for certain hardware.
As a contributor, I’m biased, but let me put it this way: it’s the distro that made me so comfortable using it and with a community so welcoming, I became a contributor 😅
I like how Peek hasn’t been updated since like 2019, not even being developed or updated anymore and they recommend it… IT DOESN’T EVEN WORK ON FEDORA!
Disrto theme bugs occur if the dev doesn’t write the app theme agnostic enough. Nothing wrong with flatpak. Those “bugs” will disappear the more flatpak is used
Are those principle still relevant? Particularly with GUI apps? I feel the sandboxing along is a good reason to switch to flatpak (or even snap if you know).
Flatpak itself is a layer of software. You could do that for regular apps too - to take away the hassle of having to manually set it up for each app. I already have two software that implements that logic in parts.
Not everyone values the same things you do. Flatpaks aren't the cause of the fact that different applications don't function correctly with different versions of libraries; they're just the solution.
Flatpak is better for normal people. It's better for most advanced users who don't want to micromanage compatibility issues. And it really doesn't have an impact on people who do want to micromanage because all your alternative ways to install software are still there.
Flatpaks aren’t the cause of the fact that different applications don’t function correctly with different versions of libraries
This problem has been solved by Nix and Guix. Nix is as popular among developers as flatpak is. Add bubblewrap to all applications, and you get nearly all the features as flatpaks. Flatpaks, meanwhile are huge and a bit slow to start - problems that Nix and Guix don’t suffer from.
I do use flatpaks extensively. But they are probably not the best solution to the problems you mention.>
Tbh, for me the value of flatpak is in the isolation (great for how easy it is to achieve), rather than the compatibility.
For example, I run obsidian with no network access and fs access to just the path where my notes are stored. This is really reassuring considering I am not really sure what all the plugins might do. While it is not perfect, it’s much better than having it running natively in my box (I.e. root namespaces).
Isolation is easy to achieve. Flatpak’s sandboxing layer is bubblewrap. It’s an independent software. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a wrapper for bubblewrap that acts like flatpak and launches applications in a carefully constructed sandbox.
It’s also not too hard to cook a Dockerfile for it, or even write a systemd wrapper with security settings. However, with flatpak you get this out of the box and mostly in a transparent way, plus you get all the usually annoying aspects (like having GUI applications work in containers) taken care of.
All of the Flatpaks mentioned on the post are available on Flathub though, we do recognize that most people use it, so we recommend apps available on it.