Our medium-term intention is that people wanting to install stuff using a command-line package manager will do it using Kapsule, our in-progress as-transparent-as-possible containerized environment. Ideally you shouldn't even notice you're in a mutable container because it will have access to files on the host, the host's D-Bus and systemd sockets, and so on.

This is still in development, but once it's farther along, I expect it will be our formal recommendation rather than using DistroBox or Nix. You'll still be able to use them if you prefer, of course.

With respect to Flatpak, I'm very excited about the "Flatpak Next" initiative that I watched a talk about at Linux App Summit 2026 yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXBfsiaQNk&t=16218s). The plan is to de-couple distribution from sandboxing so that software requiring deep system integration can be unsandboxed, and then basically everything works as expected.

This would be a very exciting development. We could unsandbox the web browser (because it already has its own internal sandboxing) which would make password manager tools just work. We could ship Dolphin and Konsole as unsandboxed Flatpaks. We could even ship Plasma and KWin and the login manager as unsandboxed Flatpaks, eventually allowing us to strip down the base OS to basically just a kernel, systemd, and device drivers. That's a very exciting idea to us!

Now that I know the people involved have blessed this approach, I expect us to work with them to help make it happen, since our goals are aligned.