I’m not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they’re a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it’s like 6 or 7 steps, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they’re easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say “oh why do you need that”, but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn’t have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I’m not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn’t mind Snaps, but I’m getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don’t like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you’re using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it’s not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I’m currently using has, and I really enjoy that it’s just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
I seem to have constant issues with AppImages. Every single one I have currently won’t open. I get an error message relating to either qT or GTK. Tried searching for the error and get a bunch of old forum threads talking about either not being compatible with Wayland at all, or comments stating that the one specific AppImage in question must have been “packaged badly”. Thankfully, nothing ‘mission critical’ for me is an AppImage currently, but it is quite upsetting that I have the most problems with the supposed “just works” app packaging/distribution option.
Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.
What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn’t really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there’s no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.
But there’s no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.
Yeah that’s why I’m a bit weary of switching to Wayland, so many apps still seem unsupported, or have issues, whereas on X11 everything for me just works. Plus, the two DE’s I’d actually consider using either don’t have Wayland support at all or have very early experimental support (Cinnamon and Xfce) so it’ll still be a while for me before I am able to consider switching to Wayland, assuming everything else works.
I don’t actually know if it is a Wayland issue - most of those forum posts are like 3 years old… And I have definitely used these same AppImages in the past on Wayland without issue. I think the AppImages are expecting some specific dependency to be installed on my system that is no longer installed due to updates. (which I thought was counter to the entire point of an AppImage? I thought it was supposed to be kinda like Flatpak where it has it’s dependencies in the image? Maybe I just misunderstood AppImage…)
To give you some hope, my Distro switched to Wayland as default a little over a year ago (i think) and I have not been running into problems (outside this AppImage problem, if it is indeed a Wayland issue, which I cannot confirm or deny).
I’m not a huge fan of Flatpaks, they’re a lot harder to distribute offline versus something like AppImage. Seriously, you have to like create an offline repository, then create a bundle, and it’s like 6 or 7 steps, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous lol but other than that they seem fine, and they’re easy enough to update (but so are apt packages)
I know some people may say “oh why do you need that”, but Linux has taught me that my computer is my own, and I should be able to use it the way I want to. I shouldn’t have to fight with my package manager to get it to do what I want. So I guess you could say, no I’m not really a fan of Flatpaks.
Personally, I didn’t mind Snaps, but I’m getting kind of really fed up with especially for-profit companies etc so I don’t like Snap that much now either.
Apt packages are nice, but the more of them you have installed, especially if you’re using Ubuntu-based distros and have lots of PPAs, the more annoying upgrading your distro version can be because of all the dependencies and cross-dependencies.
AppImage tends to just work for me, as long as it’s not compiled with a newer libc-bin version than the distro I’m currently using has, and I really enjoy that it’s just one file I can copy and run pretty much anywhere.
I seem to have constant issues with AppImages. Every single one I have currently won’t open. I get an error message relating to either qT or GTK. Tried searching for the error and get a bunch of old forum threads talking about either not being compatible with Wayland at all, or comments stating that the one specific AppImage in question must have been “packaged badly”. Thankfully, nothing ‘mission critical’ for me is an AppImage currently, but it is quite upsetting that I have the most problems with the supposed “just works” app packaging/distribution option.
Yes, Flatpak is overall a better approach when compared to AppImages, since being dependent on a known runtime ensures the program will run whenever the runtime is available.
What I wish they would add is a way to run the flatpak in a portable way. Because as it stands, AppImages is the only option for that. Flatpak doesn’t really allow to have a portable installation in a pendrive, for example. At the moment there’s no replacement for AppImage in such use cases, which is a pity.
But there’s no fundamental technical design roadblock in flatpak that would prevent it from supporting this in the future, imho. theoretically one could create a program that mounts the flatpak file into a ramfs layered with the runtime and run it.
Yeah that’s why I’m a bit weary of switching to Wayland, so many apps still seem unsupported, or have issues, whereas on X11 everything for me just works. Plus, the two DE’s I’d actually consider using either don’t have Wayland support at all or have very early experimental support (Cinnamon and Xfce) so it’ll still be a while for me before I am able to consider switching to Wayland, assuming everything else works.
I don’t actually know if it is a Wayland issue - most of those forum posts are like 3 years old… And I have definitely used these same AppImages in the past on Wayland without issue. I think the AppImages are expecting some specific dependency to be installed on my system that is no longer installed due to updates. (which I thought was counter to the entire point of an AppImage? I thought it was supposed to be kinda like Flatpak where it has it’s dependencies in the image? Maybe I just misunderstood AppImage…)
To give you some hope, my Distro switched to Wayland as default a little over a year ago (i think) and I have not been running into problems (outside this AppImage problem, if it is indeed a Wayland issue, which I cannot confirm or deny).