Linux 101 stuff. Questions are encouraged, noobs are welcome!

Primarily, it is to the app developer's advantage to use flatpak for distribution, as that lets you concentrate on getting one consistent version of your software out on an environment that is the same for everyone - the flatpak sandbox. If you use traditional methods, one of two things have to happen - you need to maintain multiple versions of your deb and/or rpm package, to cater to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, SuSE, and Enterprise Linux users. That didn't include Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, or from scratch source compilers. Which gets to part 2, hoping each community will make and keep up to date the source code builds themselves, because: Having source code and build environment settings for different distros to build from source and have it work in each distro, which may require or have available only certain versions of any libs you call on, that might not work with your code. This is "dependency hell", and it only gets worse the more linuxes you want to support directly.

It's a lot easier to just ship the flatpak with the dependencies in them or linked in their flatpak libs as well. One set of dependencies and one build that runs on everything.