I generally think these arguments (containers, flatpak) boil down to: I don't want to figure out how a distro works. I'm unsympathetic to that; it's actually pretty easy to figure that out: they almost all use systemd and making a deb/rpm is also straightforward (there are great guides). Distros are also great at updates, to the degree devs can largely outsource a lot of it to them (compared with Windows where you're writing update functionality into your app, or whatever).
I'm not even sympathetic to weird cases like OBS needing a forked version of ffmpeg. 1 this sounds like a wacky thing to do, 2 it sounds like they created a new project that is a different dependency. Call it something else (I suggest obsmpeg), package it for distros, pull in updates from ffmpeg whenever you want, reap the benefits of FOSS. Inventing an entirely new software delivery system instead seems like an overreaction.
I am sympathetic to working this out across multiple distros though. Finding the intersection of packages across multiple versions of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora isn't super easy, and it can really hamstring you when building an app (you want to use libcool-1.8.x, Ubuntu LTS has libcool-1.2.25, :sad:). The ecosystem isn't set up for this and it's a pain to deal with in your app (you more or less #ifdef functionality out, which product managers will freak out about).
I'm not even sympathetic to weird cases like OBS needing a forked version of ffmpeg. 1 this sounds like a wacky thing to do, 2 it sounds like they created a new project that is a different dependency. Call it something else (I suggest obsmpeg), package it for distros, pull in updates from ffmpeg whenever you want, reap the benefits of FOSS. Inventing an entirely new software delivery system instead seems like an overreaction.
I am sympathetic to working this out across multiple distros though. Finding the intersection of packages across multiple versions of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora isn't super easy, and it can really hamstring you when building an app (you want to use libcool-1.8.x, Ubuntu LTS has libcool-1.2.25, :sad:). The ecosystem isn't set up for this and it's a pain to deal with in your app (you more or less #ifdef functionality out, which product managers will freak out about).