I'm not proposing anything here, I'm curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it's now your desktop computer. That's one vision. ChromeOS has its "everything is in the cloud" vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it's free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
Flatpaks, like Snap (that it does mention) are the "upstream packaging" the entire article is about. Specifically about how they both have software vendors directly publish packages to their repositories without maintainers in between.
Yes, those are good. (Not sure how reproducible it actually is since I can't find a way to download build files from flathub, though...)
What do you mean by that?
Snaps only have one central repository which is controlled by canonical. I can set up a flatpak repo myself if I want to.
I haven't validated a package either but I read that you are able to do it.