I’m not really sure who denies that Flatpak is a distribution, but I’m certainly not one of them. Since there’s no package manager those will be in seperate runtimes. Because sometimes you need Gnome libraries, sometimes you need KDE libraries. Conveniently it also provides multiple runtimes to make sure there’s not actually a single base to work on. Instead of providing seperate packages with a package manager it provides a runtime that comes with a bunch of dependencies.

It lacks a kernel and a few services and it lacks the standard Linux base directory specification but it’s still a distribution you need to target. While the developers like to pretend real hard that Flatpak is not a distribution, it’s still suspiciously close to one.

I recommend reading his article before my response, as I won’t be replying to every point raised. While Martijn, the author, contrasted Flatpak with Alpine Linux, I’m going to be contrasting Flatpak with popular Linux distributions, as, to me, it makes sense to contrast Flatpak with some of the most used distributions. I want to go over the article and address some points that were raised. Recently, the article “ Developers are lazy, thus Flatpak”, by Martijn Braam, was published to criticize a few things regarding Flatpak. “But Flatpaks are easier for end users”.“But packaging for distributions is hard”.“So what about traditional distributions”.Response to 'Developers are lazy, thus Flatpak'

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