Appimages are awesome for the regular user. Single file, just double click to run anywhere. Snap and Flatpak should die a quick death and all the work should be used to improve Appimages. There's no other concept for the end user as simple and clear as this.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Linux
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They mimic the apple application format to some degree and it is a great way to distribute. The real detriment is sandboxing but with more support this could be included.
I double clicked, the program didn't run because it's missing some dependencies
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It would be nice if there was a way to bundle up a flatpak that was at risk of disappearing
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flatpak?
Frying pan, meet fire.
AppImages can be signed. Flat pak is the lesser option for security
Explained in a other comment how a pain it is to verify such a signature.
Is that stored in the appimage file?
I find it funny how flatpak neglectors always spell it wrong
Needed to have zulip to talk about a bug, the AUR package was a pain to debug, the appimage in ~/.local/bin just works™.
Why do I hear the argument about no .desktop entries in every thread like this? Creating a .desktop file is a requirement for the appimage creation tools to work, and appimaged installs it in the system menu immediately. It's seamless.
Feather Wallet is a great example of AppImages done right
Flatpak is bloated monster that has no idea how much it has to download to update. I'll take AppImage over flatpak if I can.
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Static binaries, or dynamic binaries whose project has documentation on what dependencies they need, are better than appimages. This is because appimages are a container with the actual files inside, creating a layer of abstraction, and appimages require libfuse to work.
Imagine the case in NixOS, where dynamically-linked binaries don't work out of the box. You can patch or package these binaries, or just quickly use something like steam-run to emulate traditional Linux bin and lib paths, it works. With appimages, it won't work unless you already have libfuse in your system, so you have to extract the appimage first.
Still, flatpaks as the only official alternative isn't great for many reasons, and CLI/TUI programs are out of the equation. What is better is the devs distributing unpackaged binaries, jars, etc, and optionally flatpaks. Either way, Nix's repository is huge so I don't usually feel the need to run anything that isn't a nix package.