I have only read section “1” but I already have more than one reply worth of thoughts…. Windows software from yesteryear frequently requires an installer that

I have only read section “1” but I already have more than one reply worth of thoughts…. Windows software from yesteryear frequently requires an installer that will not run on modern Windows. 16 bit installers are very common. So, the situation is not quite as rosy as reported. My main complaint though is calling Flatpaks “light-weigh VMs”. If you are technical, you know what he means. If you are not, this leaves a totally wrong impression. Flatpak emulates no hardware. So there are zero “virtual machines”, light-weight or otherwise. Flatpaks run in a sandbox but mostly that is just a feature of the Linux kernel. Flatpak apps run directly on the host kernel just like any other app. It is totally true that Flatpaks “waste” lots of space because the way they provide portability is to bundle all the libraries that the app may need. If we are going to complain about Flatpaks though, let’s be honest about how older Windows apps work on modern Windows. They do it by bundling all the libraries that the app will need. If you try to run ReactOS, you will learn that often you need to install old versions of the C and C++ standard libraries ( along with other things ). It is true that Windows includes much of this “out-of-the-box” for compatibility. And guess what, you pay the storage space for that on Windows. There is a reason that Windows is 30 GB freshly installed. Linux does not make you pay that tax. Instead, you have to install that stuff the first time you install a Flatpak. If you install a second Flatpak requiring the same libs, they share the space—just like in Windows. So let’s not dump on Flatpak for wasting space just because it waits until you need it to install all these support libraries. I do not want my Linux distro to require 30 GB minimum drive space just in case I install Space Cadet Pinball. Do I like Flatpaks? No actually. I use a distro with a huge repo largely to avoid them. Do I think Linux backwards compatibility could be better? Yes, actually. But please, let’s at least be honest and accurate when we talk about these things.