Flatpak is good overall but it has one things I dislike:
- Not being oriented to also CLI apps.
Apart from that, I like it for its convenience and I think it will be the future (or a similar approach). The reason for my thinking that is that, putting myself in the shoes of a distro maintainer, I can see the appeal and benefit of "isolating" the system packages and libraries from the packages installed by the user. I find it similar to the great relief that Docker brought back in the day when reduced the system administration overhead as it reduces the amount of moving parts on the functioning of an app.
You can still have your wonderful script but in the case of systemd, you delegate the execution lifecycle of that script to a unit, which, IMHO, is a great abstraction compared to the mess of having to deal with the status of the service from the script itself. You simply throw the unit file into directory, then enable it. Your script does its thing, systemd deals with when to run it, in which runlevel etc
About the logs, yes, plain text files, commands and pipes are great, but journalctl is really great too. It is powefull and includes everything you might need to inspect logs with accuracy in the same tool.
Just to clarify: I'm not a fanboy, I'm just pragmatic.
- Not being oriented to also CLI apps.
Apart from that, I like it for its convenience and I think it will be the future (or a similar approach). The reason for my thinking that is that, putting myself in the shoes of a distro maintainer, I can see the appeal and benefit of "isolating" the system packages and libraries from the packages installed by the user. I find it similar to the great relief that Docker brought back in the day when reduced the system administration overhead as it reduces the amount of moving parts on the functioning of an app.