“Thinking” without knowing causes a great many issues.
This general question is very boring - and the answers are, indeed, blatantly obvious.
If you have a good binary method, use that.
AUR is clear and transparent.
Flatpaks CAN be a great choice. Appimages are also very nice (I think nicer than flatpaks - I get Joplin-appimage via AUR and it’s very sweet).
Snapd is pushing hard - for many softwares it’s the ‘only’ choice (especially if you are daft enough to use Google and google Linux Install Plex-HTPC because - as everyone knows - ‘Linux’ means ‘Ubuntu’).
There are exceptions for so many rules… Hence the benefit of intelligent discussion (revealed by reading the thread before making inane posts).
The AUR has been feeding me Plex-HTPC for a while now - interesting method - the AUR pkgbuild downloaded the Snap, stripped it of the crud, and installed a good working copy - a binary installation.
However, recently this got messed up. I will not blame AUR for this, rather the individual user. The AUR alerted me with comments and I purged the package.
However, someone is now putting Plex-HTPC out in Flatpak and so I switched.
Plex HTPC tv.plex.PlexHTPC 1.32.2 stable system
Along with Shortwave… sometimes Flatpak is great.
A couple of times I looked into Flatpaks - and ended up with crud that didn’t work. Flatpaks are often much worse…
However, if you go reading too much Reddit you will become aware of how ‘dangerous’ the AUR is, and how ‘dependency hell’ arises from it’s use.
I remember these phrases from my days using Linux Mint and needing to use PPA’s and other repositories for getting less than antique versions of many softwares.
Interestingly, since leaving Debian and LTS Noobuntu variants, I never experienced these issues - not once.
I would like to say that I would never, ever use Snap - but the truth is that I don’t really care that much. If it was a final option, I’d probably give it a go.
Fortunately, it never has been a necessary option - thankfully the two ‘Snap’ packages I have installed come via AUR as binary installs.
So really, the ‘Current Best Practice’ is really to have some intelligence.
There’s no substitute for intelligence, and following rules (albeit very well thought out rules) made by folks much more intelligent is a poor substitute.
Read all, try to understand all, and when you need something - just ignore the rules and work it out yourself!