They're somewhat sandboxed, likely to be up to date, and it behaves similarly across different machines. It's nice for GUI programs that don't need access to the wider system, and it won't mess with anything else that I already have installed. I guess it would have similar pros and cons as containerization with Podman/Docker?

I get the vast majority of my GUI programs from Flathub. I didn't know there was a controversy with it, other than just wanting a different way of doing things.

Because it just works, and updates faster than apt.

Because at least with flatpak I don’t end up with app files littering my system and personal folders.

macOS’s application format used to be the best. It’s kind of a mess now with half of apps following xdg, some writing to the app folder, some application support and some iCloud Drive.

But it used to be good.

I have an atomic distro, and it lets me install apps without having to reboot or spin up distrobox.