Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I’ve been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I’ve never had problems with native installs, but I’m also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.

About flatpaks, I’ve learned:

• a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
• some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason… (Thunderbird specifically)
• flatpaks use more disk space

Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don’t like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I’ve been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I’d pacman -Rs pkg if it didn’t pan out.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep running the system like this, but so far it’s been interesting to run things a little differently.

Things I’ve liked:

• Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
• Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
• Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects

Things I don’t personally care about (but other people might and that’s fine):

• using more disk space
• the fact that my main system is still mutable

Things I didn’t like:

• nothing so far
• I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
• with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
• fine so far, so… not sure what I don’t like.
• maybe I’ll hit a snag soon and then I’ll change my mind