Appimages totally suck, because many developers think they were a real packaging format and support them exclusively.
Their use case is tiny, and in 99% of cases Flatpak is just better.
I could not find a single post or article about all the problems they have, so I wrote this.
This is not about shaming open source contributors. But Appimages are obviously broken, pretty badly maintained, while organizations/companies like Balena, Nextcloud etc. don’t seem to get that.
This matches very well with this talk of an OpenSuse microOS maintainer doing a followup on his thoughts of Appimages, Snaps and Flatpak.
Spoiler: Flatpaks are the only ones that work.
Snaps work too if you use Ubuntu and trust Canonical, as he mentions. I’m a bit annoyed at Flatpak for being inferior to Snap in that it can’t be used to install system components. Snap allows for a completely snappy system, without the need to build the base OS one way and the user apps another. The OS from-traditional-packages, user-apps-from-Flatpaks model is an unfortunate compromise but I guess we’re gonna get to live with it long term. It’s better than the status quo.
BTW I completely disagree with him that everyone should be using rolling releases. As a software developer, user, and unpaid IT support, this is a mind boggling position.
Yesno. Snaps are not sandboxed at all, which is a nogo for normal application distribution.
So while I think it also sounds nice to pack an OS into different immutable parts, if the entire system is flawed, its not worth it.
Flatpak is good for app distribution, the rest is job of the OS.
not rolling release but normal stable release, not some random LTS. Not every software is like Firefox ESR (which honestly is not needed as Firefox doesnt break), but Debian etc. often just randomly dont ship updates.
Fedora is a bit too rolling, but if you always stay on the older supported version, thats okay. Especially with atomic.
