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.
Each snap is mounted as its own filesystem, which is messy for several reasons (try making sense of the output of
lsblkon your system). Flatpaks don’t do that, though they sandbox in other ways. There really isn’t a “Flatpak hell”, the worst that can happen is packages that depend on different versions of the same library taking up a lot of storage space, which is a problem with snaps too.I still prefer to rely on official repos but I do use a few Flatpaks here and there. But one of the main reasons why I don’t run Ubuntu is because of Canonical’s aggressive pushing of snaps.