You know its funny, I've never heard of distrobox or toolbox, but I do know of NixOS and I do think flakes are the future purely because it actually installs on the system.

Actually, I get the impression that docker containers are gonna see more package adoption than snap and flatpak and appimage (and to be even more clear for the exact usecase those things are trying to offer)

But like everyone who tries a hand at the crystal ball I could be wrong. Probably pretty easy to guess that the Ruby enjoyer could be wrong about software stack adoption.

A little addition to my original question, since I probably forgot an important detail. I was asking about daily apps that the average user would run on a system, not dev environments. I totally get why a developer would use “easy” container management solutions or even just containers. I would like to know if, from an average user perspective, and given that there’s plenty of apps in flatpak and snap repositories, there’s anything left in “old-fashioned” package managers that is not available as flatpak or snap. Again, not talking about libraries/system stuff, just common apps like browsers, email clients, video editors, etc.

Not sure what these tools are but the general trend I see is going CNCF route (cloud native route). Containers that can run cross-platform, wasm, etc. Universal, another words. Something like Qubes OS will become a standard relatively soon and for a good reason. You have a solid secure foundation and then apps of your choice. Even if one app screws up it can't affect the system, they all run in "jails" for lack of a better term. That's my story and I'm sticking to it :-) YMMV.

While Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are designed to distribute and run applications across different Linux distributions in a more straightforward manner, tools like Distrobox and Toolbox offer a more flexible and integrated approach to running software from different distributions. They allow developers to create isolated environments for testing new software or libraries without affecting their main development setup.

I'd love to hear some expert opinions on this. I've heard snaps are slow and delved into docker containers but nothing ever felt as maintainable and performant as a standard package-managed installation.

I guess from a quick search that distrobox and toolbox are like the native look that some virtualized apps can take on so I guess the use case is local development without having to do docker-cli and different weird shell tricks.