Anyone else starting to favor Flatpak over native packages?
I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid.
Anyways, like most distros these days, Flatpaks show up alongside native packages in the package manager / app store. I used to have a bias towards getting the natively packed version, but these days, I am choosing Flatpaks, precisely because I know they will be the latest version.
This includes Blender, Cura, Prusaslicer, and just now QBittorrent. I know this is probably dumb, but I choose the version based on which has the nicer icon.
Updating individual applications is a pain on NixOS. You'd either have to override the attributes of the package (which can get quite ugly and complicated and does not always work) or pull in a new commit of nixpkgs that has the version you want which requires the download of a ton of other dependencies that were compiled for that specific commit of nixpkgs.
Flatpaks solved this problem for me and helped reduce the download size every time I wanted to update something.