Comment by tancop
7 hours ago
Appimages are bloated and unreliable. You can't guarantee that your app will run on any machine because it might depend on different system libraries.
Flatpak uses shared stable runtimes that are the same everywhere and don't take up space more than once. It also comes with a native update system and sandboxing. Snap is the same thing but worse.
My problem with flatpak is that the underlying runtime has a limited lifespan. I used the Sublime Text 3 flatpak for many years, and it was deprecated a few months ago because the runtime it was using was no longer supported. This caused people to update the flatpak to Sublime 4, which is good, but I only have a license for 3. In the end I just downloaded the binary for 3 from their website, and it still just worked. Flatpak still doesn't save you from bitrot.
There's a project called "anylinux appimages" that aims to make the most compatible appimages. They also use DwarFS for faster opening and smaller file sizes.
See: https://pkgforge-dev.github.io/Anylinux-AppImages/
> Snap is the same thing but worse
IIRC Snap relies heavily on AppArmor for sandboxing, so on anything non-Ubuntu the sandboxing is non-existent.