Gaming has finally gotten me into desktop Linux. Most of my prior exposure comes from occasional using remote VMs in a work setting, which are generally maintained by other people. That is to say: I don't have a lot of first hand experience with packaging/installing on Linux.

But my understanding is that Flatpak solves the problem of "this guy has Ubuntu and that guy has Pop! and they both want to download this app, but each distribution has its own packaging system." Having a stable target that works across distributions seems good for the ecosystem.