this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Appimages totally suck, because many developers think they were a real packaging format and support them exclusively.

Their use case is tiny, and in 99% of cases Flatpak is just better.

I could not find a single post or article about all the problems they have, so I wrote this.

This is not about shaming open source contributors. But Appimages are obviously broken, pretty badly maintained, while organizations/companies like Balena, Nextcloud etc. don't seem to get that.

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[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Needed to have zulip to talk about a bug, the AUR package was a pain to debug, the appimage in ~/.local/bin just works™.

[–] penquin@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 8 months ago

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

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 8 months ago

Feather Wallet is a great example of AppImages done right

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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

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[–] Montagge@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago

Flatpak has a good package manager?

Read the other comments etc. No motivation to repeat everything

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[–] kugmo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

don't care still using appimages and not flatpaks

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[–] spacebanana@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

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.

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