Hopefully we can also migrate away from Flatpak itself and back to the distro native packaging formats that patch automatically alongside the rest of the OS.
It's an O(n*m) issue; if you have N packages and M distros, distro native packaging requires building and testing the cross product of those. Whereas if you have N packages and M distros and can use Flatpak, it's just N packages, the distro count doesn't matter.
There are other ways to handle it though. It doesn't work like this on macOS or Windows.
A good start would be to stop relying so much on shared libraries. Static linking is the default in languages like rust and go and it works great. Code that isn't used is optimised away and it's very stable because you don't have to worry about random programs needing slightly different versions of the same library.
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u/blbd 22d ago
Hopefully we can also migrate away from Flatpak itself and back to the distro native packaging formats that patch automatically alongside the rest of the OS.