Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.