I still prefer traditional packages, but I get why devs of complicated graphical apps with lots of dependencies hate them. As for Flatpak specifically, I'm not super impressed. It's just going to get more annoying over time having more old versions of all their libraries and more and more apps that aren't updating to the latest version so they eat up a ton of drive space and give constant notices to harass the devs, but out of all the major distro agnostic options they suck the least and they're getting better the fastest, which is why I think they've pretty much won at this point. I'm not currently using them, but it's pretty much inevitable that I'll have to at some point, and overall that's probably more good than bad. I think AppImages could have been better if the lead dev wasn't a walking, talking collection of weird hills to die on, but I'm afraid that ship has already sailed.
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My totally unscientific opinion (with a double-your-money-back guarantee!):
I'm not crazy about either Flatpak or Snap for that matter as there's so much backend baggage for both as well as certain hurdles regarding privileges and access to the file system (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong or working with dated information.)
My other completely prejudiced, unfounded bias against Flatpak is that it appears to have been adopted by RedHat as "the one true way," and what with IBM's/RedHat's behaviour anti-FOSS behaviour lately, plus I've almost always have been an apt user, I find it a pill hard to swallow.
Me, say what you will about the security issues and its other flaws, but I like AppImage.
Flatpaks follow the concept "losen the sandbox as much as needed to make apps work". This sucks, in constrast to android, but its needed.
So you shouldnt need to edit anything via Flatseal/KDEs settings, if you want to make apps work.
Flatpak is default on OpenSuse too, even more as they use Flathub instead of the Fedora Flatpaks repo. RHEL is just trying to get some money and stop people from using their work, as they need to make money.
Honestly it should be normalized that people on FOSS do weird things to make money. Fedora is RHEL upstream, so RHEL is not stealing any code, just take what Fedora does and wait a bit until its stable.
Appimages are completely flawed and as an apt user you should not like to use them, at all. This post of min may give some infos, I will update it soon.
And speaking of completely flawed, your link doesn't work.
Anyway, thanks for ~~berating~~ informing me about AppImage but it's the closest thing on Linux to app bundles which IM<HO is the sanest way to package applications.
Some of the under-the-hood implementation of Flatpak irritates me, like why the hell are we installing software in /var? Using it with the terminal is a pain because of the org.something.SomeThing shit it does, and I think Flatpak gives you all the drawbacks of app sandboxing with none of the benefits. It likes to not see the whole file structure; for instance I found the Flatpak version of Steam to be unusable because it wouldn't see anywhere I wanted to put my games library. That needs to be fixed.
That said, I think it's the better of the three all-distro package managers, it's got a central repository and package manager unlike Appimage so it's a place to publish and get stuff, and it's not tied to Canonical so it's obviously better than Snap.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/flatalias
Try this script I wrote and help improve it!
if you want to change app permissions, use Flatseal and add the needed directory. This is very easy. If it is something all users generally need, open a bug on their repo.
I definitely prefer it over Snaps or appimages. Straight-forward to update, and Flatseal provides a nice GUI to control permissions (if needed). Themes may not work properly, but whatever, not a big deal for me.
The distro's repo is always my go-to. If it's not available there, then flatpak, and I'll use appimage under duress. If that doesn't work, I'll figure out a different solution.