I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid.
Anyways, like most distros these days, Flatpaks show up alongside native packages in the package manager / app store. I used to have a bias towards getting the natively packed version, but these days, I am choosing Flatpaks, precisely because I know they will be the latest version.
This includes Blender, Cura, Prusaslicer, and just now QBittorrent. I know this is probably dumb, but I choose the version based on which has the nicer icon.
I handle it by spinning up an lxd container to try new apps… then they have the whole machine to do what they like, and if the install doesn’t work or I hate the app, just delete the entire container.
lemmy was one of the harder ones to deal with because it needs docker… I have a special profile that runs docker in a container for apps like that (I never run docker bare, it f…s around with the firewalling and breaks stuff).