Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?

  • Avid Amoeba
    60·
    10 months ago

    Software deployment that tackles dependency hell in a secure fashion while providing, repeatable, atomic upgrades and rollback.

    • rutrumEnglish
      10·
      10 months ago

      Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.

      • Avid Amoeba
        50·
        10 months ago10 months ago

        You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It’s got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn’t a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can’t have any guarantees about the update process. You’re back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).

    • MonkderZweite
      00·
      10 months ago

      There’s software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the ‘whole package or nothing’ approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.