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.
Hahaha! I think developers seem to prefer it? My uses cases are 3D modelling and game engines like Blender, Cura, and Godot.
All those need to be the latest because often the updates are tremendous (as in great or awesome), making the software so much more functional and better to use.
Yeah, it also lets us ship working environments. At !2009scape@kbin.social we have been shipping our flatpak with an old environment because there was a regression in recent mesa versions that caused graphical issues on amd. We could simply deploy an update to resolve the issue for everyone instead of making everyone downgrade their system mesa…
That is a cool use case! I am learning so much about the benefits of Flatpak, not just an easy way to get software.