Flatpak is great for two groups of users: the ones who only use default settings in standalone apps and the privacy-oriented experts who know how to tweak things to their liking. In the middle is a large group of users who don’t know or care how things work, but they want that one feature an app is supposed to do but mysteriously doesn’t work with flatpak.

This password manager is supposed to work with my browser but it says it’s not running.

App X says it needs app Y for feature Z, but I see both app icons installed on my desktop.

I found a guide online to enable feature D, but when I paste these arcane commands into the text box thingy, it just says “.config/AppQ no such file”

Even one of these occurrences is enough to make most users give up on that app or the OS entirely. I like the idea of sandboxing apps, and I use flatpak daily, but we have to acknowledge and hopefully improve some of its limitations or many users (yourself included, it seems) will consider it unusable.

If a distribution didn’t come with any default software, it would be unusable out of the box by the average user. If you want that, choose something like Arch or Gentoo or LFS.

The point of FOSS is freedom and choice. You can choose a distribution that aligns with your needs, and once it’s running, you can e.g. replace Firefox with Chrome or use Nautilus instead of Thunar. Try uninstalling IE/Edge or Explorer on Windows for a direct comparison.

Brew for native commandline apps, Distrobox for software that runs on other distros. Boxbuddy (GUI) is an easy tool to create and manage distroboxes, and the default terminal app, ptyxis, allows you to switch distros easily from the top-left dropdown.

And more options in the Bazzite docs https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/

This reminds me of Harder Drive http://tom7.org/harder/

An alternative is to bind mount the appcompat folder from your linux steam into the steam library on your windows drive.

I really hope Bazzite manages to smooth out the last few snags and use cases for dual-boot so that I can recommend it to more non-techy people without needing to explain stuff like this or the unintuitive process of importing installed windows games into Lutris.

Maybe someone should do a follow up experiment to see how different the “mural” would have to be for the car to recognise it. A human would obviously not fall for something like an artistic picture of a fantasy land, but would a Tesla?

make install typically also handles copying things like libraries, shared assets, and docs as needed, but yeah precompiled software is usually a tar… or loading a downloaded package file into the package manager.