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What are people's opinions on Flatpak vs AppImage? I use both (AppImage a lot more so than Flatpak) and I'm not well educated in their differences. I shall rese

What are people's opinions on Flatpak vs AppImage? I use both (AppImage a lot more so than Flatpak) and I'm not well educated in their differences. I shall research it, but I'm wondering if anyone has some insight to share. Some apps I use (MuseScore) publish their own official .AppImage linux executables which work flawlessly for me, so I cannot abandon AppImage completely. Is it worth it to use both? Is it better to switch to one for everything, along with distro package manager? Thoughts?

badsectoracula 4y ago
AppImage is a more localized approach to Flatpak's "bundle everything" in that instead of trying to have shared libraries across different applications (Flatpak tries to share runtimes), every set of dependencies is local to the application itself. In a way it is kinda like trying to static link everything, though of course it doesn't technically use static linking - and it is really up to the developer what "everything" means (it can still rely on stuff on the underlying OS). Also it only tries to solve the dependency problem, whereas Flatpak tries to do a bunch of other stuff. From a "how things should be" perspective, both are bad IMO (see my other messages here), but from a purely practical perspective based on my experience with trying to use applications using them, AppImage tends to work slightly better and since it is local only to the application, it doesn't pollute the rest of the system. If i had to choose, i'd choose none of them, but if i had to choose between the two then AppImage is by far the most preferable.
- Infernal 4y ago
  I've looked at your other comments here but I can't find elaboration on the bad parts of AppImage. I tend to agree that AppImage is the best of the available options - do you mean that the best solution would be rich system libraries that never break backwards compatibility ala Windows? And since we don't have that, AppImage is the best we can do?
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Yes, i meant for the "how things should be", the comments i meant were those backwards compatibility which is the root of the problem and AppImage is just a workaround for it.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
    Interesting enough, appimage is basically what Windows does

badsectoracula 4y ago

AppImage is a more localized approach to Flatpak's "bundle everything" in that instead of trying to have shared libraries across different applications (Flatpak tries to share runtimes), every set of dependencies is local to the application itself. In a way it is kinda like trying to static link everything, though of course it doesn't technically use static linking - and it is really up to the developer what "everything" means (it can still rely on stuff on the underlying OS). Also it only tries to solve the dependency problem, whereas Flatpak tries to do a bunch of other stuff. From a "how things should be" perspective, both are bad IMO (see my other messages here), but from a purely practical perspective based on my experience with trying to use applications using them, AppImage tends to work slightly better and since it is local only to the application, it doesn't pollute the rest of the system. If i had to choose, i'd choose none of them, but if i had to choose between the two then AppImage is by far the most preferable.

Infernal 4y ago
I've looked at your other comments here but I can't find elaboration on the bad parts of AppImage. I tend to agree that AppImage is the best of the available options - do you mean that the best solution would be rich system libraries that never break backwards compatibility ala Windows? And since we don't have that, AppImage is the best we can do?
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Yes, i meant for the "how things should be", the comments i meant were those backwards compatibility which is the root of the problem and AppImage is just a workaround for it.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  Interesting enough, appimage is basically what Windows does