When I first started using Linux 15 years ago (Ubuntu) , if there was some software you wanted that wasn’t in the distro’s repos you can probably bet that there was a PPA you could add to your system in order to get it.
Seems that nowadays this is basically dead. Some people provide appimage, snap or flatpak but these don’t integrate well into the system at all and don’t integrate with the system updater.
I use Spek for audio analysis and yesterday it told me I didn’t have permission to read a file, I a directory that I owned, that I definitely have permission to read. Took me ages to realise it was because Spek was a snap.
I get that these new package formats provide all the dependencies an app needs, but PPAs felt more centralised and integrated in terms of system updates and the system itself. Have they just fallen out of favour?
Most of the reasons mentioned, and also they are a bit out of the way to install and setup, you don’t get much feedback as per users using them. As they integrated with the OS you have to search for them as a user, and you have advertise them as a someone packaging. Every extra step creates friction which ads up. It feels like a solution based in the concept of maintaining SEP. – Plus people aren’t exactly paid to do this.