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My question Why is the Breeze theme a flatpak? is closed for being opinion based. If you ask why a certain package is a flatpak instead of a normal .deb package, it is not opinion based. It is just a question. The fact that I want as few flatpaks and snaps on my system is opinion, but that has nothing to do with the question. Therefore I think that closing the question for being opinion-based was and still is not the right thing to do.

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... it is not opinion based. It is just a question.

It's possible that you may be confused slightly on the close reason, but that's entirely understandable. The banner at the top clearly (and yet confusingly!) says:

This question is opinion-based.

However, the problem isn't that the question is based on opinion. If you follow the help page that's linked, the problem is that:

This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.

So it's not your question, it's that the answers to it are likely to be opinion-based.

Why is it a flatpak?

This, in itself, seems to be your main (at least first) question; and many people would consider the reason why to be a matter of opinion. Unless the author of the theme answers, the rest of us can probably only speculate on why it was packaged as a Flatpak rather than a .deb. My guess/opinion, for instance, would be that the theme's author felt it was easier to target multiple distributions with a Flatpak than to limit themselves to Debian-based distributions or have to create multiple packages.

From there, it's entirely too possible to get into a "war of competing opinions" in the "answers" as to whether or not things like this should be packaged as Flatpaks, etc. That's the type of "forum"/"discussion" behavior that Stack tries to avoid so that it remains focused on being a "Question and Answer" site.

But given the rest of your context, and the answer that you accepted, it seems your "real question" is more around:

  • Why did this Flatpak get installed on my system?
  • Is it safe to remove this Flatpak?
  • Is there a similar theme available via the standard repositories?

Personally, as a voter, I probably would have take the full context of the question into account and left a comment recommending that you rewrite or replace the, "Why is it a flatpak" portion.

But I can certainly see how readers/voters zero'd in on that particular question, especially since it is the first listed.

It's likely (IMHO) a very easy reopen with some minor changes. Consider editing to replace, "Why is it a flatpak?" with something like:

  • Why did this get installed on my system as a Flatpak? (which I see @Dan has done in an edit just now)
  • Is there a technical reason why this needs to be a Flatpak?

However, note that I might be missing part of the reason why people voted to close as Opinion-based, so I'd encourage you to look for other comments/answers/suggestions here as well.

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