I'm currently traveling with my spare laptop (a cheap old Samsung). I have Manjaro installed on it. I normally use a mac for work. But I don't like leaving 5K worth of laptop around in random hotels or airbnbs.

I have about 30 years of experience with running Linux. Rarely as my main system (though I did use this particular laptop for a few months in between two macs at some point).

I got rid of both snap and flatpak. I like the idea of those two. But they are just too much of a PITA to deal with. I'd like this stuff to work how it works on my mac: mount .app image, drag the app to the Applications folder and done. On Manjaro, if I want something, I just 'yay <package>' it.

I find it very telling how commercial application developers that actually do explicitly support Linux advertise their Linux support on their websites. Mostly it does not involve the words flatpak or snap. Just not a thing. Generally you'll find some link to a deb, rpm, or tar ball (in that order). And good luck with that. Yay does a fairly good job of converting deb files for use with arch based systems. It's how I installed Chat GPT Desktop on this thing before traveling, for example.

Basically the status quo for commercial application developers targeting Linux is to: 1) ignore distros repackaging other people's software 2) ignore niche package management solutions 3) just cover the basics which is Ubuntu (deb) first and then everything else. Which means you get a deb file, maybe an rpm, and not much else typically. What they typically don't do is work with half dozen app stores, distribution specific repositories, package managers, and other walled gardens to bend over backwards to distribute their software. None of them are large enough to be worth the overhead.

This system kind of works. There's no need for OpenAI to support Manjaro with a Manjaro specific package. Yay can work with a simple deb. All the developers have to do is make sure to statically link the essentials and not make too many distribution specific assumptions.