The file picker API is there to allow apps to access and save files with the user’s consent, while bot having any filesystem access. So a properly sandboxed app would be able to open, edit, and save files wherever the user wants, while not having access to any other irrelevant files, such as your .bashrc or memes folder.
IMO Flatpak is the best of them all. I don’t want to bother with repo packages that have complete and unnecessary access to my system. Flatpak neatly installs an app and isolates it, and if I no longer want it I can just easily click “Uninstall” on my Settings app without it leaving a mess or any trace behind, unlike repo packages that manage to screw something as simple as uninstalling itself.
All of the points of the previous comment are actually valid. Plus, immutable distros are much safer and easier to tinker with than traditional mutable distros. For example, an extremely specialized Arch setup would be much more stable and easier to jumpstart if it was a personalized Universal Blue image, even all your Flatpaks can be declared and installed at setup.
There were some talks to migrating all PolyMC Flatpak installations to Prism Launcher, which was achieved by marking PolyMC as outdated on Flathub’s repo and marking Prism Launcher as the newer version, which will result in Flatpak clients replacing PolyMC with Prism Launcher while moving data over. The only thing users would notice is that the icon and name on the apps list changed, since all worlds and instances would stay in place.
Unfortunately I think they didn’t continue with this decision.
Using this method to bypass the Microsoft account requirement on pure Prism Launcher is better than relying on a downstream project, IMO. Especially since PollyMC’s releases are lagging behind Prism Launcher (which is expected for downstream projects), and the latest release 7.2 was behind for an entire month.
Sure, they can try and push their Bedrock version… But nobody is playing on that piece of crap.
As somebody who plays Minecraft very often on my phone, I can say Bedrock Edition would’ve been a very good platform if they just didn’t aggressively push their Marketplace BS.