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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Don't use Appimages (a writeup about all the reasons they are a pain for users) (github.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I'm confused. You call flatpaks bloated but AppImages have to bundle everything with them and there's no dedupping or sharing libraries between them, unlike with flatpak. Unless the devs assume you have certain libraries and certain versions of them, which kinda ruins the point of AppImages. How come you think flatpak would be more bloated than AppImages as a packaging format?

has no idea how much it has to download to update

That's actually the dedupping stuff in action. It knows you might need this much at maximum, but realized you only needed to download a lot less since you already had most of it downloaded beforehand. It's funny but I can't see it as a big issue tbh.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Appimages come with the library dependencies, flatpaks come with that + multiple versions of the runtimes and drivers. Flatpaks make the most sense if all you use it's that, otherwise you will have 5 different versions of mesa, gnome runtime, video codec libraries and other runtimes for little reason.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

When you're talking about bloat you meant when using just one or at best a few apps and otherwise using repo packages? I was more thinking as a replacement for repo stuff, with 5+ apps. The more you have flatpaks the better the advantage of them over AppImage would be with dedupping and shared runtimes.

The dedupping works between different runtimes and whatnot too btw. So two versions of gnome runtime don't actually use all that space they claim they do, just what has changed between them.

Not to mention the savings when it comes to download size over time. Unless they've made some delta download system for AppImages, which would be pretty cool.

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