canadaduane

The short answer is "yes, but only as much as it needs to". Flatpak had to make a decision between "do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades" or "do we minimize space" and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It's happened to me before--for example fslint. I don't think this can happen with flatpak.

It's funny, I do almost the exact opposite--whenever there is a flatpak version, I prefer it over a built-in apt package. The flatpak is almost always more up-to-date and often has the features and bug fixes I need.

Examples:

• Vorta (0.8.12 flatpak; 0.8.3 apt)
• Pinta (2.1.1 flatpak; 1.6 apt)
• Minder (1.15.6 flatpak; 1.13.1 apt)
• Xournal++ (1.2.1 flatpak; 1.1.1 apt)

.

I don't think it's fair to expect the distro maintainers to be up to date with every software out there--the universe of software has grown and grown, and we just can't expect them to wrap/manage/test every new release and version bump.

Snaps are basically Ubuntu's private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there's no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don't work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).

When you're just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don't look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don't distro hop just to see what you're missing.

Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you're trying to get work done.

Forces you to reboot.

I'm just learning about distrobox.