this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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AppImage isn't like an exe in Windows. It's much more like a App Bundle in MacOS. Way way better than just an .exe
AppImage is still kinda trash though.
I begrudgingly prefer AppImage to being told to make make install, at this point. You know those little projects that will never go into a standard repo or flatpak. For example, some ham radios used a converter box that hooked up to a Windows 95 PC via serial so you could program its internal memory. Well, none of that shit exists anymore. so some guy somewhere has written a thing to do it with a Raspberry Pi's GPIO. 444 people in the world will ever download and use this software. I'd rather you AppImage that than tell me to git clone make make install.
Only if done wrong. They are brilliant in general.
I'm not familiar with app bundles, and tbh my only experience with exe's are the kind that are just zip files with a different extension. I'd assumed that under the hood they were similar, but I guess I never actually checked.
There are virtually no .exes that are zip files with another extensionm. They are executable binary files and nearly always require a slew of support files (just like Linux binary executables)
Is that not common anymore? I remember back in the day I'd commonly end up with installers that were just self exteacting archives with a little extra. Idk I haven't used windows basically at all in at least a decade
Installers. The vast majority of .exes are not installers. The thing you actually run would be an .exe (and all the other files) deployed by the installer to some directory.
Right. That makes sense, thank you for clearing it up.