Because there is a push for software developers to be able to package directly for end users. Without devolving into the usual flame war of whether it's a good idea or not, once you install any piece of software you incur some security risks. It's not like distro maintainers are a 100% guarantee there won't be a backdoor in the binary, and compiling software from source doesn't free you from risks either, unless you code-review everything you install.

My point is, containerisation on Linux isn't necessarily slow—in fact it's unnoticeable if implemented correctly—and I prefer to default to having a decent amount of security by containerising as much software as I can, whatever the origin. Including, and especially software like the calculator, since it should not be able to do anything more than show a GUI and add numbers together.

That's not what i asked, why do you trust a no name dev more then the distro your kernel is coming from? And do you really think flatpack prevents you from running packed malware?

Why do you assume the flatpak comes from a no name dev? My calculator flatpak comes from the same people who wrote it, and I obviously trust them, otherwise I wouldn't be using their application.

So why should I trust them less than my distribution?

Ever used npm?

No, and how is that even relevant?

>So why should I trust them less than my distribution?

Just use google -> npm malware

I said I'm not using npm.

With my calculator flatpak I only have to trust one person and to a much lesser degree, because they declared that the calculator can't access my personal files to begin with. The same app in my distribution repository has full read-write access to all my users files, network access and much more. So yeah, I trust it more.

Distribution maintainers are nothing but a middle man, which don't even audit the code they package, so there's nothing I gain from them.

In my particular case: I don't want to wait months or even years for updates to arrive in my distribution. With the Flatpak version I get updates usually on the same day they are published, since the Flatpak is also maintained by the calculator developers, and I also get a calculator which can't access my ssh keys or the internet, due to sandboxing. And in case of any breakage, I can also quickly roll back to the last version.

Without flatpak I'd need to use some rolling release distribution, where not just a few applications get updated quickly, but also the rest of the system, which I'm not interested in.