Programs don't come up.

[RLynwood]

Thanks for that rather detailed explanation, even if incomplete. But, actually, I had asked earlier what the advantages of these containerized programs were, too, and I'd still like to know. You did give some advantages above. If there are important additional ones, I'd like to know. Your explanation, in addition to being your personal preference, seems directly to apply to me, and I'm inclined to prefer the old packaging system, too, at least partly for their reduced storage space (over the containerized equivalents). It looks like most of your reasons would apply to me.

This almost certainly isn't relevant to me, but why would you want to use Flatpacks in Zorin?

At this point, without further thought, I think I'd prefer to install an all binary Kubuntu in btrfs. What do you think of that? The additional program-invoking time and even booting time doesn't concern me at all, and I hardly need the very latest version of any of my programs, least of all Kstars, which I never use (I don't think I'll ever use it anymore; it's there for reference).

[GreyGeek]

At this point, without further thought, I think I'd prefer to install an all binary Kubuntu in btrfs.

An excellent suggestion.
It is how I've run Kubunt since BTFRS was made available in 2016. Being able to make a snapshot of your system in one or two seconds, and being able to restore a busted system to the previous good snapshot in one or two minutes gives awesome comfort when one decides to experiment.
1) Make a snapshot of @ and @home as @yyyymmddhhmm and @homeyyyymmddhhmm
2) Do your experimenting or updating. If things work out and you want to keep the change then jump to step 4
3) Something bad happened - time to roll back. Copy @yyyymmddhhmm to @ and @homeyyyymmddhhmm to @home and reboot.
4) Continuing using your system.

[Schwarzer Kater]

To give at least a brief answer (I will probably have no time to write something more in this forum during the next 10 days or so):

Zorin OS (the current version being based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) relies heavily on Flatpaks, especially the "Pro" version.

Concerning btrfs: there are many people in this forum who use it as their main file system (e.g. most of the very helpful admins of this forum do, afaik) - I am even not really sure if you subjectively would notice a decrease in file system speed compared to ext4 as a home/desktop user.

[RLynwood]

Thank you very much. That's important info.

[RLynwood]

The post identification field of the initial post doesn't give a Paused option, so I'm saying here now that that's what I'm doing with this tread. I'll return to it when I need to.

[GreyGeek]

Thank you very much. That's important info.

Black Cat stated:

Concerning btrfs: there are many people in this forum who use it as their main file system (e.g. most of the very helpful admins of this forum do, afaik) - I am even not really sure if you subjectively would notice a decrease in file system speed compared to ext4 as a home/desktop user.

I've used ReiserFS and EXT4, which are both fine FS's for their purposes. However, I've been using BTRFS since 2016 and I will never use any other FS
Why? First, unlike ZFS, BTRFS automatically tunes itself. It's drop dead easy to learn and use, and at 82 I find that a benefit. And, as Ubuntu has configured it (hence Kubuntu) with @ and @home, it is the most practical configuration, when compared to OpenSUSE, IMO. Here is a test comparison of the four major FS's available to Linux. BTRFS is better is some uses and worse in others. It all depends on your use case.

My PC is an 18 month old HP 17-cn0*** with 16GB of RAM, Intel i5 CPU, a 500Gb Samsung SSD main drive and a 1TB Samsung NVMe for snapshot archiving, along with an 500GB Crucial SSD for remote storage. Here is my use case: I run Minecraft, Universe Sandbox^2, Kerbel Space and a couple other Steam games, and do a lot of Python and Jupyter Notebook programming using various databases, some large and some small, to analyze various hypotheses. (Retired Physics, Math, Chem, Bio, computer sci prof) I also have qemu and KVM set up to run test distros. I never have to wait for my file system to do its work. I have a RF dongle on which I run a Software Defined Radio app. There are other apps and uses but my memory isn't as good as it used to be. To summarize, since 2016 I have never lost my filesystem or the data on it.

[jlittle]

I had asked earlier what the advantages of these containerized programs were, too, and I'd still like to know.

The salient advantages are that developers of software have (ideally) one target, and the work of packagers is much reduced. Without them developers have to set up and test for the major distros, and test against all the current versions of them.

[RLynwood]

Thank you both for those comments. I'm a normal (?) consumer using my computer for reading information on the 'net and saving quite a bit of it, documents and videos, occasionally an audio. Right now my computer is almost totally screwed up. I have information in about six OSs/partitions. I'll save a description of the rig for my next post because that's where I want to pick up next. At the moment I haven't decided how to begin. In the mean time, I'm using Kub. 22.04 on a 128 Gb flash drive and saving my info. on that drive. More whenn I get to it, soon, I hope.
GreyGeek, I'm 80, also retired, also failing, and love your tag line (is that what it's called?). If I did such things, these days that's the sort of thing I'd put/use.

[RLynwood]

I don't know how I got that post in twice; it was an accident. Darn it, I don't see how to delete the second one. Please tell me.

[Snowhog]

Please tell me.

You can’t. I did.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Sorry I forgot about this thread…

If you want to learn about different (Linux) file systems and their speed in different scenarios (and want to learn about various other Linux-related stuff, too), one of my favourite Linux Youtubers (DJ Ware) publishes comparisons from time to time (he uses the Phoronix test suite and some of his own tests).
He also has videos about containerized applications:
https://www.youtube.com/@CyberGizmo/videos