I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid.
Anyways, like most distros these days, Flatpaks show up alongside native packages in the package manager / app store. I used to have a bias towards getting the natively packed version, but these days, I am choosing Flatpaks, precisely because I know they will be the latest version.
This includes Blender, Cura, Prusaslicer, and just now QBittorrent. I know this is probably dumb, but I choose the version based on which has the nicer icon.
I don’t like flatpak or snap or any of them. System libraries exist for good reason, just because your computer is stupid fast and you have enough disk for the library of Congress a couple times over doesn’t mean you should run a veritable copy of your whole operating system for each program. IMO it’s lazy.
Sandboxing is a different thing though, if that’s the purpose then it’s doing it right.
I have a ton of flatpaks which means packages are shared between them, so no it’s not lazy or a copy of the whole system. It makes a ton of sense for stability.
Updates are diff’s so downloading and updating is fast. Not entire packages.
Making every package work with only a certain version of a dependency and hoping it is stable doesn’t make a lot of sense.