mudamuda

Fediverse is tribalistic like such communities often are.

Flatpak was started by RH employee but has been developed with significant community effort.

Flatpak uses ostree, which was originally created in GNOME for GNOME OS. And GNOME has contributors not only from RH but form Endless, Collabora, Purism and others.

Flatpak can work with OCI remotes, this is what RH more interested in. And Flathub uses only ostree. OCI remotes are used in Fedora Flatpaks repacked from fedora packages with the runtime based on fedora. But who use it anyway.

Flathub itself is independent community effort. It uses org.freedesktop.Platform based runtimes which are not based on any distro.

XDG Portals are shaped by Flathub maintainers and applications developers where RH also doesn't play significant role.

I use flatpaks mostly. Flatpak dependencies (runtimes) are stored separately from the host system so and don't bloat my system with unwanted libraries and binaries. App data and configs are stored separately and better organized. Everything runs in sanboxes. I use overrides extensively. All these are very convenient for me.

Where can I track package versions without installing? https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ and https://packages.debian.org/unstable/ show outdated packages.

The problem with Debian testing is that packages are not fresh, neither packages are fresh in sid. So, Debian is not a replacement for rolling distros like Arch Linux or openSUSE Thumbleweed

As alternative to the RHEL and its clones maybe. But there is no alternative to Fedora in Debian (with exception to Ubuntu and derivatives) family, even Sid consists from outdated packages.

And ChromeOS is even more popular.

What you see when you upload files is not a FM but an open file dialog. Yeah, it sucks. Maybe it's worth to play with xdg-desktop-portal and alternative fronteds: e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-kde. But I don't know if it's better.

Do you mean "Debian Lenny Community", right?

BTW I use GNOME without any extensions.

First of all, I think an idea of package management separated from a system environment is generally good for desktop usage. And don't like and the idea to place all existing application software in distro repositories. But implementations are far from ideal. So I list those bellow from worse to better.

1. AppImage. It highly relies on the environment doesn't have native sandboxing, and promotes bad practices like building apps with old libraries.

2. Snap. Snap is mostly fine but relies only on AppArmor for confinement, has performance issues for a long time without significant progress. It promotes a proprietary app store. Relies on Ubuntu infrastructure. Good: snap store support signed packages and more friendly to developers.

3. Flatpak. App start time is near to native. It has stronger sanboxing but with many holes for compatibility. It true distro-independent as well as popular runtimes are also distro-independent. Bad: Flathub doesn't support signed applications. Sandboxing and permissions rely on hacks and tricks which are far from good design. Development is slow but it is true for the mentioned above as well.

With that, I am more open to new alternatives, especially if started from a system point of view rather than from a position of distro-independent package managers like Google did with Android. For example, sandboxing can rely on users separation and work on various operating systems not only with Linux kernel.