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?
My problem with appimage is that they never work. Every time I tried one, best case scenario it crashed with a random error message. All attempts to fix them were damn near impossible to debug.
It honestly felt like they were not universal enough and still relied on certain libraries being available on OS. Hopefully I’m wrong because that would completely defeat their purpose. I stopped wasting time on them after Plex and VLC both failed to run reliably and switched to flatpak that “just works” 100% of the time.
To be honest most of the time I look for an rpm anyway. Flatpaks are always a last resort. I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed.
This was my experience as well as a developer trying to package an application as an appimage. Creating an appimage that works on your machine is easy. Creating one that actually works on other distros can be damn near impossible unless everything is statically linked and self contained in the first place. In contrast, flatpak’s developer experience is much easier and if it runs, you can be pretty sure it runs elsewhere as well.
Flatpaks have the concept of runtimes; instead of downloading the entire qt tooling for a qt app the app could just use the KDE runtime same goes for GTK with the Gnome runtime. Flatpaks also have dependencies which can be shared between multiple apps even when they are not part of their runtimes, they are called "baseapps". Flatpak apps still use double the space my normal apps take on a fresh install, so I assume using appimages to replace them will leave no space on my SSD.
Before deciding to settle on using Flatpak I tried to search for appimage permissions and how to set them, but it seems there is no such thing? If that's true then there's another advantage for Flatpaks and Snaps.
Also with all due respect: Flatpak and Snap tooling are not maintained by Probonodb.
What do you mean by AppImage permissions? A sandboxing feature like “access only those directories, those /dev devices, …”
EDIT: obviously this isn’t just for AppImage, but I tested it with AppImage and it work well. Another tip: if you want a package manager for managing AppImage installations try zap (github.com/srevinsaju/zap)
Just download .exes for windows and run them with WINE. Don’t have a single snap or flatpack application. If it doesn’t run then u didn’t need it in the first place 👉😎👉
Edit: someone DMed me and took this comment seriously. Bless ur heart
My problem with all three is that trust, security, quality comes from package to package. There is no standard, and packages are isolated from each other. If there is an issue between multiple apps, developers just start pointing at each other. With distro like opensuse I know everything is tested properly including security bug coverage and package interoperability. I can even check it myself at openqa.opensuse.org
With flatpaks I am at mercy of each developer not being lazy and well informed about all current issues.
openSUSE’s Richard Brown has given multiple talks over the years comparing these three. I’d suggest anyone to look at those for a great rundown on how these universal package managers compare to one another. His most recent talk can be found here; in which he actually does some kind of recap as well.
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.
Distro packages and to some extent Flatpaks, use shared libraries which can be updated independently of your app.
So for example, if a vulnerability is discovered in say, curl, or imagemagick, ffmpeg or whatever library an app is using: for AppImages, this won’t be fixed until you update all of your AppImages. In Flatpak, it usually can be updated as part of a dependency, or distributed as a rebuild and update of the Flatpak. With distro packages, you can usually update the library itself and be done with it already.
AppImages are convenient for the user in that you can easily store them, move them, keep old versions around forever easily. It still doesn’t guarantee it’ll still run in distros a couple years for now, it guarantees that a given version will forever be vulnerable if any of its dependencies are because they’re bundled in, it makes packages that are much much bigger than they need to be, and you have to unpack/repack them if you need library shims.
Different kinds of tradeoffs and goals, essentially. Flatpak happens to be a compromise a lot of people agree on as it provides a set of distro-agnostic libraries while also not shifting the burden entirely onto the app developers. The AppImage developer is intentionally keeping Wayland broken on AppImage because he hates it and wants to fulfil his narrative that Wayland is a broken mess that won’t ever work, while Flatpak developers work hard on sandboxing and security and granular permission systems.
It is very unfortunate. It’s fine to point out problems, but then when you become part of the problem, that’s not amazing.
He’s had the same meltdown with fuse2 being deprecated in favor of fuse3 which, guess what, also broke AppImage and we had a huge rant for that too.
Flatpak has a better chance of being forward compatible for the foreseeable future. Linux generally isn’t a very ABI/API compatible platform because for the most part you’re expected to be able to patch and recompile whatever you might want.
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
There’s software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the ‘whole package or nothing’ approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.
Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.
You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It’s got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn’t a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can’t have any guarantees about the update process. You’re back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).
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