Snap/flatpak style application packaging is absolutely necessary. Please let me explain this.
Every platform needs a way to distribute and install third-party applications. It is unlikely that the authors of the platform wrote all existing software so you need some way to install applications not included into an OS.
On Windows, there is such a mechanism - pack your application into a large installer exe. It is awful and not secure but at least it has been working for ages. For comparison, on Linux there is no such mechanism at all. Typical Linux distribution traditionally has only two supported ways to install software:
a) install more components from OS repository
b) write and compile the software yourself
While there is lot of third-party software for Linux, there is no universal distribution mechanism. Typically software developer only supports the release they are using. There may be ports - by other developers or by the distribution maintainers - but they are often broken and don't even start (for example, port of waydroid in Fedora).
Some port installation methods are outright dangerous, for example: running a curled script through sudo or adding a third-party repository to your package manager. That is a sure method to get a broken system, and it will be totally your fault because your distribution doesn't support such installation method so you got the result that was expected.
In my experience, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian are especially bad for supporting applications other than Gimp or Libreoffice: the ports for these distributions are often broken, buggy, crash or even do not exist. For example: waydroid, carla, ardour.
The reason is that there are hundreds of releases of different distributions and nobody is going to port, test and maintain all applications for all of them. So the obvious solution is to choose a standard platform and write applications against this platform. I see no other solution. If I am writing some GUI application I am not interested in learning how Linux distributions are different from each other. I would rather ship an Alpine virtual machine image and not waste my time.
Flatpak/snap might become such platform but why they are so buggy? As I remember, Steam in flatpak is broken and cannot properly use GPU, VS Code is broken etc.
No, this is an orthogonal concern. Bundling all the dependencies and killing users hard disks is not a solution to the “Every platform needs a way to distribute and install third-party applications” problem. If anything the proliferation of packaging formats and useless quibbles between snap and flatpak move us farther from the solution as there are now several competing dependency-bundling installers which require installing a package handler anyway.
In that respect flatpak is better because it’s more universally available than the Ubuntu-specific snaps (attempts at making snap cross-distro are laughable and failed) but it still introduces a bunch of tangential issues which are too much of a bother for the average user versus just doing “apt install” and moving on with their lives. PPAs cover this acceptably if suboptimally for Deb packages.
Every platform needs a way to distribute and install third-party applications. It is unlikely that the authors of the platform wrote all existing software so you need some way to install applications not included into an OS.
On Windows, there is such a mechanism - pack your application into a large installer exe. It is awful and not secure but at least it has been working for ages. For comparison, on Linux there is no such mechanism at all. Typical Linux distribution traditionally has only two supported ways to install software:
a) install more components from OS repository
b) write and compile the software yourself
While there is lot of third-party software for Linux, there is no universal distribution mechanism. Typically software developer only supports the release they are using. There may be ports - by other developers or by the distribution maintainers - but they are often broken and don't even start (for example, port of waydroid in Fedora).
Some port installation methods are outright dangerous, for example: running a curled script through sudo or adding a third-party repository to your package manager. That is a sure method to get a broken system, and it will be totally your fault because your distribution doesn't support such installation method so you got the result that was expected.
In my experience, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian are especially bad for supporting applications other than Gimp or Libreoffice: the ports for these distributions are often broken, buggy, crash or even do not exist. For example: waydroid, carla, ardour.
The reason is that there are hundreds of releases of different distributions and nobody is going to port, test and maintain all applications for all of them. So the obvious solution is to choose a standard platform and write applications against this platform. I see no other solution. If I am writing some GUI application I am not interested in learning how Linux distributions are different from each other. I would rather ship an Alpine virtual machine image and not waste my time.
Flatpak/snap might become such platform but why they are so buggy? As I remember, Steam in flatpak is broken and cannot properly use GPU, VS Code is broken etc.