Rusty Corgi on Nostr: I think Flatpak is an even more fundamental difference. Flatpak in a lot of ways ...

I think Flatpak is an even more fundamental difference. Flatpak in a lot of ways supersedes the entire idea of distributions by moving all of the packaging (ideally) upstream. I understand downstream packaging for core system files, but always felt packaging by the original developers made a lot more sense. With system dependencies you could never really do that without statically linking everything or having crazy versioning at the distro level, but now that you can package your app with a runtime or include things you need in your container in the package itself, it gives developers all the power over their own apps. The maintainers who work on distro packaging are awesome and it's crazy how much work they do, but it's also just a lot better in my mind to move that work upstream.

Also, as a side note I really don't understand the appeal of Debian. The packages are so old and there isn't a particularly great versioning system, and the package maintainers have a tendency to make some headass decisions. For desktop Linux and server Linux I feel like there are just so many better options. People always recommend Debian though and I'm confused by it.