When comparing Flatpak vs RPM (RPM Package Manager), the Slant community recommends RPM (RPM Package Manager) for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” RPM (RPM Package Manager) is ranked 5th while Flatpak is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose RPM (RPM Package Manager) is:
This makes maintenance and support easy.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Cross-distribution
You can install flatpak packages on any distro you want.
Pro fast
searching, installing and updating are faster than others in my experience
Pro Doesn't bog system down like snaps.
Plus it's not proprietary.
Pro Application sandboxing
All applications are limited to a set of predefined permissions, enhancing privacy and security.
Pro A well-written documentation
Pro Flexible runtime management
You can install a lot of runtimes for different apps, making applications a lot more compatible while still allowing some applications to share their runtimes.
Pro Easy to create packages on non-rpm based distros
This makes maintenance and support easy.
Pro Follows the UNIX philosophy
It only does one thing and that well.
Pro Part of LSB
It is part of the Linux standard base.
Pro Very easy to create packages
It is very easy to create packages for it, you just need a small spec file.
Pro Standard archives
RPM packages are simple cpio archives that have additional compression support.
Pro Much more advanced than apt
Cons
Con Bloated
Due to the way Flatpack handles packaging, this can lead to a large cache being created which quickly inflates to unreasonable sizes. Not only this, but using flatpack requires a large chunk of space to be reserved for it's own file hierarchy.
Con Difficult to export packages
It is difficult and convoluted to export installed packages and move to another system.
Con Doesn't work well with CLI programs
Invoking CLI programs can be a pain. From the weird reverse DNS package names to difficulty in easily managing container environment.
Con No interaction
RPM does not support user interaction upon install.
Con Many forks
Currently there exist rpmv4, rpmv5 and distribution specific forks like Mandrake's urpm.
Con Plenty of different frontends
Almost any rpm distro has its own frontend for rpm there is zypper, yum, apt-rpm, dnf, poldek and many more.