If we were to pay attention to just a few comments from the community, it seems that most of us Linux users prefer to use the programs offered by the native packaging of our distribution. We also prefer to compile the programs or just use binaries, but the voices defending the flatpak and snap packages don't sound quite as loud. We might think that nobody likes them, but the statistics of Flatub they say something very different.
It is difficult to draw many conclusions from numbers. Before going on to give those about Flathub, we must remember that Linux is installed on between 1-comma-something and 3% of desktops. We are very few, and this must be taken into account. With this idea in mind, the flathub statistics they tell us that already have exceeded 1000M downloads, and in total they have 2104 applications. The date it all started was April 29, 2018, just over 5 years ago. There are many? They are few? I think there are quite a few if we take into account that almost 98% of computers use Windows or macOS and do not have access to this type of package.
Most Flathub downloads are from the US
Most of the downloads almost a fifth of the total, are made from the US. It also highlights that more than 10% are made from Brazil, and then the rest. In Europe, the first place goes to Germany, with almost 100M, and in Spain we do not reach 40M. In other Spanish-speaking countries, Colombia exceeds 8M, Venezuela does not reach one million, Ecuador exceeds a million and a half, Peru is close to 2M, Bolivia exceeds half a million, Chile does not reach 5M and Argentina exceeds 10M. Russia and Australia also show up on the map in a slightly lighter color, with the former having more than 50M and the latter above 13M.
In the graph of downloads from May 2018 to May 2023, the trend is up. The line is low at the end, but simply because we just entered the month.
And what do you like the most? It downloads a bit of everything, but there are two sections that stand out from the rest: in first position, the games, closely followed by earnings. Then appears the peak of network apps, multimedia and then the rest.
Clean apps, for any system... but with dependencies
Among the points that are mentioned to describe this type of packages, such as snaps, it is said that they do not have dependencies, and this is only half true. Just like explained in its day, an application that weighs 22mb can require a space of 1.3GB if it is the first flatpak package that we install. In order for them to work, you have to download those of the platform (GNOME, KDE...) on which it will run. These packages are heavy, and, since they are depended on, I believe that they are dependencies. Also, they act a bit like the real dependencies of the official repositories: they are downloaded once and are not downloaded again from the second program that needs them.
Also, being isolated (sandbox), they don't always look as good as those in official repositories. Flathub was until recently part of GNOME, or rather, heavily dependent on GNOME. They have recently stated their intention to be a completely independent company, but the point is that a lot of what we find on Flathub is designed for GNOME. If we use an app created in GTK in a Qt environment such as KDE, the application will not look as good as one from official repositories that can use a Qt version. For example, GNOME Boxes.
Personally, I prefer AppImages, which are throwaway executables (if needed), but the Linux community seems to like Flathub.
Appimage is the best if the intention is to use a program or app that works like the portable ones in Windows, they are quite useful if you need to carry them with you in a removable memory and without installing anything or depending on externalities they run without problems or line obligation of commands... Now, Appimages also require some internal dependencies to work, the preference for flatpak is that it offers sandbox security, functionality regardless of the linux distribution you use and that you don't have to be downloading dependencies left and right... Which , with Appimage you would have to do it whenever the program or app receives updates (either for improvements and additions or for security); while with Flatpak it is not always necessary to update all dependencies every time your favorite program or app receives updates. In this sense, we could say that there would be no difference with snap, however, the forced centralization of the repository for snap and that its packages for some reason work slower in many cases compared to flatpak, make the community opt for flatpak by default. . Regarding Venezuela, as a Venezuelan, considering the slowness of the cheapest internet and the difficulty of having modern equipment with which to be more "up to date" with technology, it makes it difficult for there to be many flatpak users.