I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid.
Anyways, like most distros these days, Flatpaks show up alongside native packages in the package manager / app store. I used to have a bias towards getting the natively packed version, but these days, I am choosing Flatpaks, precisely because I know they will be the latest version.
This includes Blender, Cura, Prusaslicer, and just now QBittorrent. I know this is probably dumb, but I choose the version based on which has the nicer icon.
It depends. Kind of prefer Flatpaks as they are always working as expected on any distro, but some of them are giving me just too much struggle.
For example, dealing with sandboxing, or especially VSS code app. Yes, there are instructions, but then I install Golang SDK via Flatpaks the hard way (using CLI) for Go development, then having a nightmare trying to setup everything in vss code. Then how tf should I access go binary within my host terminal?
On Arch Linux I just tend to install from official repos, while the rest of apps - from Flatpaks.
Personally I don’t like the way they are sandboxed, bit as long as it works I am fine.
That seems to be the running theme, the defaults for the sandbox seem to be wrong for some people and there is no easy way to change them.
Also, I am sure I would like Arch, my problem is that I was using Manjaro, which is the distro I originally fell in love with and basically converted me to using it full time, but a long time ago. Now it sucks.
Anyways, that is the best, official Arch repos.
I use flatpak first for everything, but VSCode was one that I absolutely installed the old fashioned way. It just needs to much system integration and I couldn’t figure out how to let it out of the sandbox enough to make it work reliably. But it is the exception.
Simple example when I wanted to install the latest version of Okular, which came as flatpak. Owing to sandboxing it couldn’t do the inverse search from a pdf, calling Emacs to open the tex file that generated the pdf. My workflow was broken. After spending half a day in forums trying to understand how to give more permissions to the flatpak, I finally ditched it and am using the older version from apt. Works seamlessly.