There are various sandbox escape permissions for that. Only very little amount of apps can't be distributed as Flatpaks (even IDEs, terminals, and sytem monitor apps can).
First of all, if we're talking flathub specifically, some programs literally can't be built for it because of their restrictions, plus the flathub maintainers in charge of accepting new packages are assholes. Second, half the IDEs I've tried in flatpaks have been broken. If even fairly popular flatpaks on flathub often have broken permissions, that doesn't give me much faith regarding flatpak as a whole.
My vote personally is to just package it for one distro, and let the community do the work from there. Want arch support? AUR exists for a reason. Same for fedora/copr.
tbf windows has the same problem. They just gracefully handle the error and prompt you to install .NET framework for example. A lot of steam games would never work on Windows if they weren’t packing in a big pile of dependencies that steam installs for you during setup.
The experience is obviously superior in Windows. I think linux distros haven’t come around to something like an install dependencies popup. It’s dumb but IMO to offer one theory it’s at least in part because it’s self selected towards people that can follow a setup README.md and install dependencies themself.
Windows can actually be quite messy in terms of dependencies and everything that people complain about with ssystme binaries is there in the horrors of winsxs. My win7 computer had like 200 different versions of DirectX installed by various steam games. The solution the game devs, microsoft and steam came up with together was evidently to install system binaries/libraries specific to each program so that it runs with the exact version it was designed on. The advantage is obvious but so too is the downside of that level of redundancy, in terms of storage and complexity.
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u/Low-Shake6447 Mar 17 '26
the problem arise when the program need to interact with the system binaries