I believe that deb packages should be first-class citizens in every project that distributes binaries since Debian and its derivatives have the largest user base in the Linux ecosystem.

I have mixed feelings for containerized applications since everything depends on your actual use case.

• Containers were first used by sysadmins to improve a system’s security through isolation of apps and services. This is of little concern to most end users.

• Then came the developers who started using containers to streamline the deployment of apps and their respective dependencies. Again, this is hardly an end user scenario.

• Finally, the light bulb moment: Containers can also be distributed to end users in the form of Flatpaks, Snaps, Appimages, etc.

They can be run like regular apps, with the inherited benefits I’ve described above (isolation + inclusion of dependencies). So, what could go wrong?

These benefits come at a cost:

• Isolation: clunky system integration (wrong themes, missing icons, inaccesible files). These can be fixed, of course, but not everyone wants to be bothered with additional tinkering.

• Dependencies: Having redundant libraries and/or additional runtimes in your hd may be a deal breaker for some, but I suspect less technically inclined users won’t mind the overhead.

I still love the idea of a distro-agnostic package format, but in the end, the issues I’ve previously described, add unnecessary complexity to the user experience. This is why I don’t think native packages are going away anytime soon.