So (having tried various distro for almost 2 decades now, but always reverting to windows) the two useful things as I read that are 1) not having to know thst some bullshit distro doesn't use apt and you need to figure out wtf the package manager is because this distro is a special snowflake and they wanted to show the world by being a bitch and not using apt; and 2) direct from devs, which is nice and imo preferred.

But like... native packages mostly handled this? I've been watching from the sidelines for a few years as this happened and I'm still like 'this is a solution looking for a problem, and adding complexity in the name of simplicity'.

Can I get a tl;dr on flatpak? I think it's basically snaps but again 'we can make this standard better! by creating another fragment to the available standards!' which is just, ugh.

That kinda is (one of) the big issues with Linux, in my eyes - everyone thinks their shitty implementation is best, and this happens for everything, and so instead of having one standard for everything you have 53 and none of them get the proper dev time and so 'I can do this better' and now you have 54 standards and [...]. Like, it's cool to be able to patchwork together the special sauce of 18 distros manually, but like... There could be consolidation and then 1 would have the special sauce of 18 in a user-friendly iso instead of taking 35 hours to get working. As a user, I want shit to just fucking work, or be moderately easy to get. Adding more fragmentation to the space is doing a disservice to the whole community.

My thoughts.