This is a really neat concept. I love that they’re recognizing the tradeoffs of both tiling and floating window managers and imagining a better way.
I think the mosaic idea is interesting and has a lot of potential. I agree with their self-assessment that it’s success depends greatly on the simplicity and utility of the window preferred size API, and how willing/able app developers are to adopt it. This is unfortunately yet another place where the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem shows it downsides.
Nonetheless, I’m really hopeful about this. I would love to see a future where mosaic window management becomes ubiquitous. But really I’d be happy as long as my desktop supports configurable workspaces.
Flatpak is definitely the way to go if you’re still getting started in your Linux journey.
The reason that flatpak apps are typically more up to date is because they are most often managed by the actual developer of the app. In contrast, the default apps in the Pop shop (which are deb packages, but that’s not super important) are managed and updated by popos itself (and/or Ubuntu/Debian that popos is built on), which is why they’re often slower to update. The developer has little to no day of when these packages are updated, and usually most packages are frozen between major releases of the distro.