It's a pretty mixed bag honestly. Sure there are some apps that we get in a mammoth poorly made appimage we'd probably have to have run in wine before or some terrifying statically compiled program embedded in a run script and that's probably a win.

The trade-off is every developer being their own distro maintainer, 100s of gigs of duplicate dependencies, broken containers with missing libraries, leaky requirements on the underlying system, and everyone needs to be a security expert to understand all the options in flatseal to expose the right features.

Also, instead of one distro source, I've got at least 3 and I've in the last week had to install programs from multiple sources trying to get a functioning version. This feels like the norm rather than an exception.

Also this week had an app image broken by a requirement on a removed system library outside the app and a flatpak missing a key library forcing me to dig up an old .deb version. The later I lost like 6hrs on because clearly libusb was installed on the system but I didn't realize I'd installed the flatpak and in wasn't in the container. Such fun.

So it's not really all sunshine and rainbows yet.

Actually I want to write an app browser for NixOS now.

Don't really need sandboxed software for that. Ubuntu comes with their own software store and even if you only select deb, you just klick on install and you're done