I agree, there’s a place for flatpaks and appimages, but for the most part my computer isn’t it. If I was setting it up as more of an appliance or as a work computer in a fleet of devices, sure they’d be great. I installed VLC in it’s flatpak form on accident once and it was worthless because the entire reason I installed it was to watch either a DVD or Blu-ray, and it didn’t have the libraries to read the disc. It took me far longer than I’m willing to admit to figure out it was because flatpak. I’m sure there’s a way to work around that, but at that point I was done with any flatpaks for anything that might need additional anything.

They do cut down on needing multiple versions of the same package, so I’ll sometimes install the flatpak version to try something out if I’m not sure it’s what I want.