Quoting: RedjeI consider myself a casual user.
And I don’t really get the hype for flatpak. Me and friend of mine had several big annoying bugs. For example; in the steam flatplat my nvidia 3080 mobile was not working in games. And games installed outside flatpak worked just fine. And also apps just not working with flatpak, and local app just working as expected.

Flatpak is out there for 10years+ or so? And still such big issues…

Steam is a terrible example of flatpak - it's not created, or recommended by Valve. I'm actually not sure who created it, tbh, but it's a constant source of issues on our Discord support channel when people use it.

The "hype" for flatpak is two-fold. First, it's not distro-specific, so any Linux distro can install a flatpak and it'll generally give you the same experience regardless of what libraries you, personally, have installed, either manually, or through your distro. Second, it's containerised, which means that it has far less access to your PC than normally-installed software, hence less ability to negatively impact your system (e.g. through malware).

That second point is the cause of so many of the Steam issues. Games often need quite a lot of access - screen recording for Steam Replay, access to microphones, access to gamepads, sometimes even access to external filesystems (if you have a "Games" drive, for example). So a Steam flatpak was always going to be challenging. You can use flatseal to manage these permissions, or if you're on a recent version of KDE Plasma, you can manage them directly from within System Settings.

I kind of wonder if Valve will ever fully embrace flatpak and create an official version (and make it the recommended install). Might solve a few issues!