Thanks for the detailed review @RafaelPalomar I agree this sounds like creating a fourth package, and will likely to create a quite a bit of extra burden on the maintainers. We are already quite stretched maintaining consistent functionality across three major OSes.
I am predominantly a linux user myself, and while I see the appeal of being able to install Slicer from a package manager, I think the download numbers are not going to justify to invest the time into this. I also don’t think the Linux usage will go off the roof after introducing flatpak version.
Having said that, there might be minor (hopefully) tweaks to improve the user experience in Linux:
- Perhaps we can embed a Slicer.desktop file to make Slicer part of the application list
- If we can detect and return the list of missing base libraries necessary to run Slicer on that specific Linux environment after the first run. (As opposed to user going to the downloads page and try to troubleshoot that).
Do you think these would be possible or worthwhile, without adding too many layers of complexity?