flatpak nightly maps and 3.20 epiphany
Debian stable 3.14 maps and epiphany
As you can see, the flatpaks work quite well, even if they ignore the gtk theme and you'll add 1-2gbs to your / just to install the gnome 3.20 runtimes and a few applications. Epiphany has fixed what ever issue prevents it from signing into google accounts and maps has fixed their tile issue (which is also fixed in an upstream patch to 3.14, but yet to be fixed in Jessie) How much I'll actually use them or even whether I'm going to keep them installed, we'll see.
The main thing I'm interested in hearing is other Debian users opinions of where they think this is headed and whether it's a good idea- personally I've always considered the package management systems of most GNU/Linux distributions as a major advantage over Windows/OSX, and the increased disk and memory usage is certain not something I welcome. The fact that snap and flatpak both want to be additional package managers on our systems would also kind of defeat the beauty of aptitude upgrade and the entire system is upgraded.
I do see a number of good uses for it though- testing nightly software, giving access to more up to date software to older/more stable distribution releases, and of course security.
The idea of portability across distributions however doesn't strike me personally as a huge selling point- it shouldn't be too hard for me to compile an open source application for both Debian and Arch, or Debian and OpenSUSE, etc. a developer just has to make the source available and if someone wants it they can compile it, usually without too much difficulty. In that situation distributing software through normal channels with shared dependencies makes way more sense most of the time. So the main situation where a single format really makes sense looks to me like proprietary software, which doesn't exactly make me enthusiastic. What do you guys think?
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