Take a look from this perspective: with distro packages, a separate person (the package maintainer) has to build a piece of software against the versions of dependencies the distro offers, which are not the ones the developer of the software uses and tests against. Then you have users that encounter bugs with this build of the software, and the developer of the software receiving bug reports against all kinds of dependency matrices, whose combinatorial complexity is overwhelming. With the different paces of distros in terms of package versions this is inevitable. On top you have overworked package maintainers which leads to sparingly updated distro packages or even orphaned ones.

For no party in the linux ecosystem this is a great experience.

Either it is this, or giving packages the opportunity to not share dependency versions, which can cost a bit of disk space. With the low price of storage, I think it becomes quite clear why flatpaks are so popular. Also in the end, users do not shape the linux landscape like they would with commercial products, as distros do not rely on sales to users. Developers and maintainers shape the landscape, and so what floats their boat is largely what happens.

For linux as a whole, flatpak is one of the greatest things that ever happened. For the first time, one can treat it as an actual platform, and that makes it a strong ecosystem.

Nothing is bug free, but that doesn’t mean everything is sort of the same just different flavor.

The last couple days I dealt with Windows, which is out of the ordinary for me. I had to build a little thing and chose PowerShell and that is quirky but ok at a glance. Now we are in 2025 and PowerShell is a modern thing, and kid you not you install a thing using Module-Install and then you uninstall it using Module-Uninstall and what happens? The thing is only gone partially and some broken remains stay. And then another curiosity comes up where after long rummaging it turns out that one user (Admin) simply cannot see another user’s mounted share - has microsoft ever heard of the concept of “permission denied”?

That’s not a differently flavored bag of bugs, that is like decades of computing and software engineering hadn’t taken place

Only if the application source code fits the API of the library versions on your system. Otherwise you also need to port the application to your available library versions. Also using different dependency versions might surface bugs that you have to sort out yourself.

I only want to point this out because it often seems that the people that complain about flatpak do not grasp what maintaining a package entails, and your suggestion effectively puts you in the position of being a package maintaier for your specific distro. (But the upshot is that with open source software you are always free to do this, and also share it with other people through (community-) repositories)