Linux

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

That has been my experience recently. I had the same mindset as you until a critical piece of software I use shat the bed on Arch (LiveCaptions) that affected my being able to watch training videos for work.

Because it was time critical and I didn’t feel like possibly breaking other things for one package, I grabbed the flatpak. It came with its own nvidia driver package (mine was newer) and it worked out of the box without having to mess with anything and that was enough to change my hardline view on that.

Now it’s just another tool to use in an emergency when important things randomly break.

As someone who develops and distributes a small application exclusively on Flathub, I prefer that everyone uses the exact same package on every system. That way I know that if something doesn't work, the issue should be easy to reproduce.

Recently, there was a situation where a user indicated in the comments of a release announcement that a newly introduced feature “doesn't work”. It turned out that they installed a third-party package from the AUR (that wasn't updated yet) without knowing that this isn't the official and up to date version.

This is what's so great about Linux, you can use whatever the hell you want.

Flatpaks provide some cool security functionalities like revoking network access to a specific application. Maybe you care about this, maybe you don't.

My personal policy is to always install from the repos. Occasionally something is only available in flathub, which is fine for me. I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and diatributions and totally respect the devs using a format that just works everywhere. If I were to release a new Linux app, I would totally use flatpak.

Yes. You can always build from source; If need be