Yep I've had the exact same experience. I love that pop is setup out of the box to work well with flatpaks and flathub too--I rarely have to mess with out of date debs, the pain of snaps, etc. The gnome extensions they pack in for tiling windows, adding desktop icons, are fantastic too. It just works.
The fact that they include flatpaks together with normal packages is confusing though. They appear just the same in the pop_OS store and there are many duplicates because of that.
Very inconsistent behavior for installation: flatpaks require no specific rights but normal packages require sudo password. Not a good UX in that regard.
The confusion is there's no info on what's different between them presented to the user.
I know vaguely that flatpak is "like docker" in terms of wrapping dependencies.
I have no clue how that translates to missing features of compatibility issues with other apps.
Even knowing which is more up to date isn't shown. Or why i should pick one over the other.
The multiple packaging types confounded my efforts to debug an issue I had with VLC, as i initially thought it was a flatpak permissions problem.. No evidence, just hearsay by what i'd seen of flatpak in general online.
Yes it does? If it doesn't matter, why are there two or even 3 options at times for the same software with little detail as to why?
And if the packaging difference does matter (as it did for my vlc issue, one solution only worked for the deb), then an explanation for newbies should be given as to the general expectations for each package type.
Or should I just "git gud" and go digging through ppa/flathub? mailing lists to find a 2013 reply to a post?
I feel your frustration and honestly with 25 years of desktop Linux experience I've come to the conclusion problems with software are most common in the deb packages. For better or worse Debian maintainers patch and hack apart software to work 'the Debian way' and that almost always introduces quirks and issues for end users that are never documented well.
Like for example I've been playing with Kodi and as a deb package you can't install some (but not all) add-ons through the built in UI, you have to go find special apt packages for them and install those outside the Kodi UI. Nowhere is this documented or visible to users--Kodi's webpage doesn't concern itself with how Debian packages it so no mention there, and Debian itself is a black hole of information for end users. The exact same issue is present with RetroArch and its Debian packages version. My bottom line is I always pick a deb package as the very last option and expect pain or confusion when doing so.
Nope, this is a very good point. Because for example you can't use Python/Selenium with a Flatpak version of Chromium, while you can with .deb version on Pop_OS. If you have no clue what the difference is between both of them, you would have no idea why it's not working in one case and not in the other.
1. Slack is a snap. Do you have to run it in the browser? I don't know if desktop sharing works well there, it's been years since I only used their app (Electron?)
2. Is flatpack optional or are there some mandatory flatpack apps that are part of the system? I'd like a deb only system.
3. Contrary to some of us I don't want to use a tiling window manager. Can I keep using my heavily customized Gnome Shell or do I have to use whatever System 76 created for Pop_OS?
Flatpak is optional, it's just setup out of the box so if you want to flatpak install stuff it just works. Their app center also shows flatpaks but has a drop down where you can pick either the deb or flatpak version if both are available.
And the tiling extension is off by default. It's just a little toggle in the (very nice) settings dialog to turn it on or off. You can totally uninstall it too as it's just a regular gnome extension (and you can even install it right now on non-pop gnome 3 systems).
