this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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BC it's easier for the any dev to package their program for flatpaks assuring it'll work in all distributions, otherwise you have to wait for your package manager maintainer to repackage the program for your system. Which is what happens for Arch, debian, Suse, Fedora.
It's not Thunderbird/program responsibility if they decided to make flatpaks the main source of distribution yet you decide to install it through other means. Which idk if they did but more devs are opting to distribute through flatpaks.
Still no reason to use the flatpak if a repo packet exists.
There are a couple of reasons. For starters, the applications and all of their files/dependencies are contained in a single location, making them easier to manage/remove and help avoid any dependency hell. They're distro agnostic, which makes it easier for developers and distro maintainers to troubleshoot. The applications are also somewhat sandboxed, which essentially doesn't exist otherwise on any distro. Not a perfect solution by any means, but I install all of my main applications this way. Permissions can be further tweaked/restricted with Flatseal. Only thing I'd be wary of is installing any Chromium-based browser this way as it replaces Chromium's layer-1 sandbox with Flatpak's, which is inherently weaker.
I am talking from a user perspective, not developer reasons. Also tinkering with flatseal = lol.