I mean, yes, but I don’t think anyone is intending to do use packages only based one factor. Popularity is a reasonable heuristic for quality and long-term continued support. And my reading of OP is that they’re trying to gauge the popularity to use it for that. I think it’s also a decent enough measure for discovery, since usefulness (hopefully) should correlate with popularity and the latter is more measurable.

In the past, I’ve used Fcitix (in Plasma anyway) and found it to work well.

Since I switched distros and moved to Wayland though, I haven’t managed to get it working again.

Ubuntu had a thing for a while where they would send you a CD if you asked for it. Friend of mine from school gave me one.

I really like App-images. For the most part, they just work, download, run, done. And sometimes you want the flexibility to install something the distro’s pacakage manager doesn’t give you (or doesn’t have the latest version of). It’s a little extra work to put the app in system menus, etc though.

Package manger still preferred. Having the system deal with updates and dependencies is nice.

AUR is still good, but I’d take the App Image. Sometimes these work for me, sometimes they don’t. Still have to manually update them, AFAIK.