It does not reduces maintenance. And it costs hard drive, and with heavy use, probably ram too

Redundancy of dependencies in different versions, might also be loaded in ram in different version, which can add its own kind of problems in some circumstances.

Maintenance is only reduced on the surface level. The complexity you don’t see as a problem is the actual maintenance problem. It’s not a problem only if you’re not the one dealing with integration, maintenance or security.

Piling abstraction layers is bad design imo. For performances, complexity and maintenance.

My opinion on flatpak is that it only allows developers to be loosy with dependencies. I’m convinced it will fall appart in a decade or two because it’s too messy and bloated as a technical solution.

There are a lot of things an average consumer don’t wa’t to deal with, but that’s true for windows as much as Linux. The question is not what they want to do, but what they need to do and if it seems difficult.

A command line can also be distributed as a bash script btw. The difference with an obscure executable that will edit the registry on windows it that the bash file can be checked much more easily.

I have a brother who is not into computers. But he has a shitty laptop (with only 3gb of ram) so windows stopped working on it (because Windows update). So I installed a Linux on it, and he is very happy with it.

He even managed to change the desktop by himself. Installing some stuff was not obvious (like making a scanner work), but I did it guiding him by phone and text.

Command line is in fact much easier in this case than any gui. In a gui, you must know it by heart to correctly guide the person. A command line you can fine tune it on your side, send it on discord, and he only has to copy/paste. That is much more powerful.

And the security is not less than downloading an executable on a dubious website.

It is true that specialist tend to overestimate the skill of unknowing people. But when it come to computer, people also forget that normal people always went for the help of specialist for their technical needs. Nothing changed.

I was in agreement until you talk about flatpak…