Possibly because the Gnome project has announced a Flatpak-based distribution (if I got that right anyway), which would have brought Flatpak prominently to people's minds again.
It was announced a while back that they were going to look at making it an end-user OS as well. The actual, new announcement [1] says that they've produced the first Preview release for it, with the caveat:
> In all likelihood, GNOME OS Preview will be with us for a few years. However, we are explicitly not promising updates in perpetuity. If you’re not OK with re-installing your OS in a few years to switch to GNOME OS Stable, this is not for you yet. But if you’ve already been curious about giving GNOME OS a try, this is the moment!
I'm sceptical that that brought Flatpak top-of-mind however.
I have no knowledge on the subject, but developing and testing on a distribution only Gnome developers will ever use does seem very on brand for modern Gnome
> We would like to compare it to Xorg in a world in which Xorg development kept moving forward, but counterfactuals are hard.
If Xorg development continued, we would still end up with Wayland, just under a slightly different name. You can only keep the X11 protocol, even with extensions, going for so long, and we've long since reached its expiration date.
> No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU.
I mention this in the article.
> ...because it's 30 years old, and (like Wayland) was not designed with screensharing in mind?
And unlike Xorg, Wayland didn't have it hacked on. There was an actually decent library available (PipeWire) and portals that made it work nicely, and fit with the vision of the Wayland developers.
> It's really not. I've written software that unconsciously targeted both x11 and Wayland perfectly fine. Even native applications in xWayland run... like native.
I am interacting with the X protocol and trying to sort it all out and no, it is NOT perfectly fine. It's enough of a hell that I'm considering leaving the heavy lifting to third party libraries like SDL, Winit, and Smithay.
And yet the only place it's completely usable are TVs, consoles, and macOS. Quote the whole thing, not just a snippet.
> HDR is a pretty new thing. It’s still a child everywhere but TVs and consoles. macOS is probably the most usable platform in that regard. Windows supports it too, but the experience can be iffy, as well as their automatic SDR -> HDR conversion.
Many things have been around for years, but development focus and people actually using those things is a different story.
