Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
This may be a little bias but this is my understanding:
Flatpaks were the solution for reducing the duplication in Appimages and providing an automated way to do security updates. Flatpak got a chance to learn from Snap.
Snaps are basically a proprietary approach to creating and distributing Appimages that were created prior to the current Appimage tooling. They got to learn from the first generation of Appimages and decided to deviate from them early on.
Appimages were a stupid simple approach to a complex issue. Initial tooling was rough though and a lot of people, while they liked the idea, hated the requirements. Basically setting up an Ubuntu 18.04 environment for packaging was the only way to guarantee a truly portable image.
It left room for improvement and so decisions were made to try and fill that room. They were never bad, and devs weren’t really trying to do anything other than simplify the creation and distribution of existing Appimage functionality.
I still think flatpaks are the closest to the ideal solution but again, I’m biased.
Flatpak provides updates, management tools, an ecosystem of common components that don’t need to be repackaged with every executable, dependency management, cleaning up unused dependencies, warnings when you are using obsolete packages, and so on
I still prefer to run everything built directly from reliable deb sources.
As an end user… sure, flatpaks and appimages and snaps are I guess neat if you are constantly distro hopping or something, at least in theory.
But uh, I have already found the ability to play games, develop games and other software, use basic daily software for everyday needs, and have a stable and predictable OS that doesnt crash or have insane misconfigurations caused by some esoteric conflict by just basing everything directly off of deb sources.
Every once in a while I will have to compile my own build, but this is rare and usually only occurs when trying out something experimental, or, also rare, something that doesnt have an actively and well maintained deb source. In that case its just a matter of doing a build from github when a new version comes out.
And I can do builds from github because I have saved a lot of storage space from not using bundled installers for all my software, allowing me to store the sources. This is also neat because it allows me to quickly /use/ one of those sources in a project, after I have already seen that it is stable via the software I use that is built on it.
Finally there is the security angle. Using a myriad of different containerized installers for everything is convenient in that you don’t have to directly worry about source management… until you do, when a source lib is discovered to have a critical flaw.
When a serious flaw is found in a source library… what’s gonna get updated faster? A containerized installer that you have to wait for the devs, who are busy managing tons of cross platform dependency issues and have to do a new safe stable build everytime any of their many dependencies for their many supported platforms? Or an app specifically built from source libs that either doesnt focus on cross platform, or has different teams specific to maintaining its different supported flavors?
In my experience, literally all of the time, the ‘direct from source’ software gets updated more quickly than the cross platform bundled installer.
Further, this whole approach here gives you experience with software that is built on source packages that, as you become more familiar with, and tinker with yourself, gives you insight into what source libs are well coded in terms of cpu/gpu/ram optimization, and which are resource hogs and should be avoided if youre interested in promoting and using software built off of efficient code. I enjoy learning from the good coding techniques of stable, lean and fast programs, and avoiding code that is comparatively unstable, boated, or slow.
Use anything you want, because all of them are safe and speedy.
Flatpaks allow packaging together all dependencies with specific versions with the package. Snaps take it to the next level by allowing to run system integrated sandboxed programs, because Flatpaks cannot have system integration. Appimages are simply the equivalent of portable USB software on Windows.
That is not how it works though, because I have been a part of these religious cults for basically forever. The hobbyist enthusiasm has a threshold, the cultism does not. It is animalistic nature to form and live as tribes. It does not become different just because the congregation tool is virtual instead of real.
Capitalism is not human nature. It is formulated around abuse of human psychology. The documentary Century Of The Self by Adam Curtis will be something you love.
Except Western imperialist countries have exploited hundreds of trillions of dollars from rest of the world, kept them subjugated for centuries, causing these luxurious software development cultures to not formulate in them. You are falsely equating software and politics being affected similarly and to a similar degree.
A bit of history. The first universal packaging format was snap by Canonical and used to be called Click apps and it was made for the Ubuntu mobile OS and later to the Ubuntu desktop. Red Hat in response to that created the FlatPak format. The AppImages are community effort. As you can see since both snap and FlatPak are developed and supported by a company they are more widely available and easier to search, install and update them. There are multiple tools for AppImages as well, which can search, install an update, however they are not pre installed or can be installed from the repo on most distro. There are dielstros which ship AppImage support by default with App Store for example Nitrux. You can use AppMan or bauh for managing AppImages. The AppMan has command line interface and bauh is a graphical application. Bauh can also manage snap and FlatPak.
IMO Flatpak is the best of them all. I don’t want to bother with repo packages that have complete and unnecessary access to my system. Flatpak neatly installs an app and isolates it, and if I no longer want it I can just easily click “Uninstall” on my Settings app without it leaving a mess or any trace behind, unlike repo packages that manage to screw something as simple as uninstalling itself.
Usually projects on github. Personally I use Appimages for things like Mypaint a digital drawing application, krita and most other KDE applications as to avoid all the dependency’s KDE has in its eco system or at least to put them somewhere easier to manage
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