As a former member of the Red Hat desktop team who helped kickstart several of these initiatives (I did a huge chunk of Wayland, before I passed the reins off to Jonas Adahl), I believe in the vision, but like many other things in the Linux space, it's fighting a very uphill battle for a vision that I personally believe is good, but I can't ever imagine coming true, and when it does, one that's far too late.<p>Immutability is good, splitting the OS from the applications is good, but what that should imply is a commitment to <i>not break anything</i>, and that's not something you can really wrangle from open-source contributors, who are more interested in writing v7, v8, v9, etc. and deprecating everything before them (though I note this is not strictly a Linux problem, we've seen it in npm/pypi/rubygems and we're even now seeing it from even big vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, but it tends to be more associated with FOSS/Linux communities). Flatpak is an attempt at a technical band-aid for a social and cultural problem, but that culture only makes the problem worse, and the solution ineffective.<p>We see this now manifest in 100 different application distribution formats, all of which have giant tables of "pro's" vs. "con's" on their homepage, all which are fighting for an increasingly miniscule userbase, heightening a war which never should have existed in the first place. Much like the sound server debates of the 2000s, applications can't simply choose one without getting into a large political turf war, and so they have to distribute in every format known to man to quell a userbase each interested in their own ideas of technical superiority. LibreOffice lists Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, <i>alongside</i> all of the individual distribution packages, right on their home page.<p>This is all to a userbase who's more often interested with tinkering than stability. Linux communities tend to be ones who have self-selected that they want their computers to be toys, rather than tools to just get their jobs done. Or they believe in some form of Linux elitism; that Linux is somehow technically superior to other operating systems, and adapting good ideas from those other systems means losing some form of symbolic war, one which they'll fight hard against. Moving the needle from a fun system that's endlessly tinkerable to a boring system that runs the apps you need and is stable is attempting to move the culture in that direction, and honestly a lot of the desktop Linux community is just uninterested in that vision.<p>Also, while I was at Red Hat, Colin Walters was probably one of the smartest and most influential people I met, and they're the real powerhouse behind a lot of these ideas (I remember when ostree was hacktree, somewhat made out of frustration so they didn't have to break their laptop while testing new OS versions). Their writing and the conversations I had with them was one of the big things to get me out of the "Linux elitism" spell. I highly recommend their writing on these topics: <a href="https://people.gnome.org/~walters/docs/packages.txt" rel="nofollow">https://people.gnome.org/~walters/docs/packages.txt</a> <a href="https://people.gnome.org/~walters/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://people.gnome.org/~walters/docs/</a>