In another topic, Nate Graham said that you’re not supposed to install programs from repositories and should use flatpak instead under Neon.
I have libreoffice installed from the official ubuntu repositories. Should I ditch this and install from flatpak instead? I had both installed, but the flatpak version seems to use gnome and is less well integrated into plasma than the one from the repositories…
When I used Linux Mint, I always needed to use PPA repositories to get software that wasn’t outdated…
I’m pretty sure that Neon, using Ubuntu repos, also gets ancient software in the repos… so I’d likely have opted for Flatpak instead…
This is likely more of an issue with Neon - which is quite a strange mix of a ‘Stable’ base, and a bleeding edge desktop… You get the newest buggiest version of Plasma in repositories with oldest and least up to date versions of software.
But for sure, using the GTK base means it will use a GTK file picker - major annoyance for software which relies on picking and saving files.
I’m sure Theme settings are likely not the best either…
However, there are options to install RPM/DEB too. Frankly this is one of the reasons I prefer a rolling distribution - not much extra maintenance but much nicer packaging.
As with Immutable distributions (which are basically extreme versions of Stable) it’s often better to go with ‘other’ packaging solutions if you need updated software.
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That’s another “beauty” of flatpaks and containerized solutions in general. I wish desktop distros would just focus in a serious, professional manner on quality with their 6-month release cycle, then everything would be so simple. Instead we have the attitude and promotion of “who cares, we have flatpaks-snaps-appimages-docker-distrobox-portals…” creating all this mess with theming, sandboxes and added complexity. And not only this, immutable systems with even more complexity.
(+1 for rolling releases though, I use Arch)