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I was browsing the Flatpak GitHub issues today because there's a lot of stuff about these new distribution methods that I find incredibly exciting, but also limiting and disappointing. Launching applications on the command line? Sure, if you like typing flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP every single time you want to launch GIMP from a command line, including it's capital letters. Launching CLI apps in Flatpak? "That's not what Flatpaks are meant for" is the usual developer response. Multiple profiles for one application would be a dream for people like me who use the same device for personal and work accounts. Another limitation is that I can't disable it's entire sandboxing feature. If you try allow all permissions via Flatseal, there's still limitations to what apps can do. I can understand this can be desirable to prevent proprietary apps abusing their permissions and to push apps to use desktop portals, but I'm afraid it might stifle innovation on apps that can automate things for you. Lastly, considering we're sandboxing everything anyway, why can't we select a custom destination of config and cache folders? Forced to use ~/.var, which means another folder on top of ~/.config. Just let me dump it there anyway!
With all of these hypothetical features out of the way and looking just at current release software, Flatpak allows you to do so much stuff that isn't accessible for a not-so-techy user. Custom installation folder? Yep. Running mesa-git GPU drivers? You got it. Any way to easily do this via GUI? In typical Linux fashion, nope. For a GUI focused packaging format this is a big letdown.
In the current day and age of malware and data harvesting I cannot wrap my head around this either. Even if you only install software from distro repos, you're bound to find a nasty little bug that accidentally wipes your system.
Remind me a little bit of this.