Rev 4/19/22
On a lark, I decided to try Amberol, a simple music player which is currently available only in the form of a Flatpak. After downloading what must have been about 100MB, which was just the first part of six, I decided that I was no longer interested in it, and terminated the installation. I've been using the MOC player, although after fiddling with Clementine (standard in MX-Linux XFCE) for a few minutes, I realized that it provides the option of dragging files and folders onto it to play them and put them in a queue, and the ability to clear the queue with a click. By default, it displays a periodic spectrum analysis, but it can display other types of waveform analyses, or none, which I chose to reduce the use of system resources, although the analyzer wasn't much of a load on the system. So, for my purposes, Clementine is a great choice. Something like Amberol would be better, if it were available as a Debian package, instead of as a separate OS to run on top of the existing OS.
I decided to see if I'm the only one who thinks that the amount of data required to install Flatpaks is ridiculous, and found a 2021 article entitled Flatpak is Not the Future at ludocode.com, written by an experienced software developer, who indicates that Flatpak, Snappy, etc. are causing more problems than they're solving, and that the solution is to standardize the libraries (the OS-modules used by apps) across Linux distributions, which is supposedly taking place to some extent.
I also looked into the global prevalence of internet access, and found that there are still billions of people on the planet without good internet access, and for them, Debian-type Linux, which includes APT-offline, is a good option. There's also the option of using a laptop or a Chromebook to run Linux, and to take the device to some internet access point (such as a wi-fi hotspot) to access the internet and to make changes to the installation. However, Linux laptops tend to be expensive. (Netbooks, which were cheap little Linux laptops with the potential for extreme security, have apparently been banned, because they're no longer available despite their popularity when they were available, or precisely because of it.) But Chromebooks which can run Linux apps have reasonable prices.
But if you don't like laptops/Chromebooks for some reason (I don't like the cost, and all the compromises made to fit everything into the case), and would rather use a PC that remains at home, and use a phone or a tablet to download web pages to view at home, and to download software/data modules to make changes to the home PC's installation, you could do the former with apps designed for that purpose (since web-pages for phones aren't the same as those for PCs), and the latter with APT-offline.
