so i read an article that talks about flatpak. they paint a grim picture about the development pace of the flatpak project.
to summarize, the initial developers left the project and development has slowed down. only small bug fixes and security patches are getting merged. no one feels responsible to review bigger changes.
this is typical for the life cycle of big open source projects, as people are fast to onboard to cool, new and hyped projects but as the project gets adopted and the features are more stable, only the boring but necessary work of bug fixes and security patches remain. most open source projects also do not have a way to monetize and can therefore not sustain the (time) cost of developing complex features.
the main questions to answer in this case is if users should look for alternatives whenever such news emerge? what does it mean for a project to be maintained? does it just include fixes or also new features? what if the project is feature complete like for example gnu/coreutils?
in my opinion, there is no need to bury flatpak, as adoption both from users and developers still grows and there is a clear value (of having a complete, distribution-agnostic package) for users. if you check flathub, which is the biggest repository for flatpaks, the amount of new applications grows almost daily.
as a tool, we could call flatpak feature-complete as it works as intended in most cases.