don't care still using appimages and not flatpaks

By the way, if you guys are interested here is a talk comparing Appimages Snaps and Flatpaks by Richard Brown, one the devs at Suse, a big contributer to openSuse and the guy who spearheaded the Desktop variante of MicroOS (the immutable openSuse Tumbleweed).

He isn't to keen on appimages either because of a miriad of technical issues.

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.

flatpak?

Frying pan, meet fire.

AppImages as a universal packaging format seem fun in that I've had loads of issues getting them to run properly on different systems. I'm sure they're handy for some stuff but haven't personally enjoyed them.

AppImages can be signed. Flat pak is the lesser option for security

I don't use app images of flatpaks. I don't like either.

I hate them both, give me a .Deb (or equivalent) if you're gonna package it. And get off my lawn! 🤣

It would be nice if there was a way to bundle up a flatpak that was at risk of disappearing

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.