Striving to solve these problems, some alternative package formats emerged, such as Snap, Flatpak and AppImage. Difficulty to support: as each distribution packages applications in a different way, and each distribution has different versions of programs and their dependencies, developers have little control over what is on the user’s computer, making it difficult to troubleshoot bugs (or even to reduce the chance that they will occur, in the first place).This is a problem mainly in distributions like openSUSE Leap or Debian, not so much in distributions with frequent updates (rolling release) like openSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux and Old and outdated packages: distributions whose lifecycle is organized into versions, which are supported for a long time (LTS, Long Term Support), often have very old versions of applications.

User limited to apps that are packaged already: not all applications are natively available in every Linux distribution, if the user needs a program that is not packaged for their distribution, they will need to download it, and often compile it manually.

That takes us to the second point, user limited to distributions that have the apps: only a few distributions had a wide range of applications natively packaged and available for easy installation and use, so the distributions that could be considered for everyday use were limited.Duplicated work packaging apps: as developers had to package the same application in different formats for different distributions, it was common to choose just one or a few distributions to support, while ignoring all the others.These traditional packaging formats presented some inconveniences for everyone – users, software developers, and distro and package maintainers:

For example, Debian and Ubuntu use DEB packages, while Red Hat, Fedora, openSUSE and Linux Kamarada use RPM packages. Until recently, different Linux distros used different package formats, often incompatible with each other.

Flatpak spotify