> [T]he Linux community abhors the concept of managing applications like they were just regular files and prefers complicated tooling, gigantic databases of dependencies, and armies of maintainers.

> Flatpak is gaining ground, which is better than continuing with the current paradigm as far as I'm concerned, but it is still worse than the simple way things were done in saner desktop operating systems.

(and from your other comment:)

> Application management on Linux is already complicated enough without having to learn a new language to use it effectively.

Linux is the only system (maybe now FreeBSD, if they've completed the migration to a packaged base system yet) where every single piece of software on a complete and usable system can be managed uniformly with a single set of automatic tools. You are absolutely correct that people using such a system are loathe to return to the fundamentally unmanageable anarchy of a system like Windows, where

* every installer does basically whatever the hell it wants;
* you can never really be sure that an uninstaller does its job;
* much software simply cannot be installed or uninstalled non-interactively;
* managing non-interactive installation for apps which DO support non-interactive management is often achievable only through some bespoke process;
* every single fucking program feels entitled to litter your system with its own bespoke auto-update mechanism (sometimes one that runs in the background constantly!);
* a brand new system with virtually no desired application software takes up 20-40 GiB, instead of 4-8 GiB;
* it is difficult to even *discern* whether or not the whole system is up to date, and bringing a system up to date requires several manual processes;
* even in the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty one, whole system installs mysteriously become slow after a few years so that they must either be reinstalled (the only sure-fire way) or treated with a laborious, manual cleanup process just to achieve sane, normal performance again.

Software management on Windows is absolutely riddled with problems that are hugely minimized by traditional Linux package managers and can be more or less totally eliminated by more innovative ones. People who are already using Linux are opposed to your proposition because we've been there on other operating systems and you are asking to drag us back to hell.

Flatpak isn't a 'step in the right direction' which will eventually take us to the manual, repetitious, chaotic, redundant mess of managing software on other operating systems. It's a fundamental improvement over that model, because it retains

* very good deduplication of shared runtimes via OSTree;
* easy management by automatic tools;
* conventional and technical constraints on what applications can do to set themselves up;
* a single central interface for software distribution;
* a more complete specification of the dependency chain, unlike the implicit and unspecified dependencies on various Windows components from different eras that cause the base Windows installation (even without any applications) to grow and grow and grow.

Flatpak is not going to give those things up, and if it did it would not be 'advancing'.

> > > standard in Linux Desktop application distribution

> > There is no such thing. There never has been, and there never will be :P

> Did I mention the other thing I hate about Linux Desktop? It's community.

This is how you react to playful commiseration about the difficulty of coordinating unification between independent, distributed, democratically managed volunteer projects? Please, I urge you in the strongest possible terms: continue using Windows exclusively, forever and ever. :)