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?
Software deployment that tackles dependency hell in a secure fashion while providing repeatable, atomic updates and rollback.
AppImage doesn’t even provide a proper update system.
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.
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.exeparadigm (orupdate.shin Linux).
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.
Appimages do not have repositories, unlike Flatpaks and Snaps. It’s harder to install or update them since there isn’t a package manager for the Appimages.
I don’t know about Snaps, but Flatpaks are sandboxed, which basically means more security, since apps won’t get access to your system without permission. It’s kind of like Android where apps have to ask for permission to things like camera access, filesystem access, etc.
While I do use Appimages, they remind me of Windows and having to go to websites to download stuff.
Personally, I prefer just installing software with my distro’s package manager and resort to Flatpaks or Appimages when it’s not available in the repos.
Distro packages and to some extent Flatpaks, use shared libraries which can be updated independently of your app.
So for example, if a vulnerability is discovered in say, curl, or imagemagick, ffmpeg or whatever library an app is using: for AppImages, this won’t be fixed until you update all of your AppImages. In Flatpak, it usually can be updated as part of a dependency, or distributed as a rebuild and update of the Flatpak. With distro packages, you can usually update the library itself and be done with it already.
AppImages are convenient for the user in that you can easily store them, move them, keep old versions around forever easily. It still doesn’t guarantee it’ll still run in distros a couple years for now, it guarantees that a given version will forever be vulnerable if any of its dependencies are because they’re bundled in, it makes packages that are much much bigger than they need to be, and you have to unpack/repack them if you need library shims.
Different kinds of tradeoffs and goals, essentially. Flatpak happens to be a compromise a lot of people agree on as it provides a set of distro-agnostic libraries while also not shifting the burden entirely onto the app developers. The AppImage developer is intentionally keeping Wayland broken on AppImage because he hates it and wants to fulfil his narrative that Wayland is a broken mess that won’t ever work, while Flatpak developers work hard on sandboxing and security and granular permission systems.
I had no idea about Appimage’s stance on Wayland. That’s very unfortunate.
E: Here’s what I’ve come across so far: https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/appimage-dev-rejects-wayland-support/
It is very unfortunate. It’s fine to point out problems, but then when you become part of the problem, that’s not amazing.
He’s had the same meltdown with fuse2 being deprecated in favor of fuse3 which, guess what, also broke AppImage and we had a huge rant for that too.
Flatpak has a better chance of being forward compatible for the foreseeable future. Linux generally isn’t a very ABI/API compatible platform because for the most part you’re expected to be able to patch and recompile whatever you might want.
Lol that reads like a squabble between 12yr olds. “He said there’s tearing in Intel but my friend told me that’s not true.”
AppImages are a good idea, but its dev is a top tier moron.
Aah yes, appimage, flatpak, snaps, progressive web apps, electron apps… The cross-compatibility of the lazy 21st century developer, where a simple IRC-like chat client comes with an entire operating system or an entire browser (which itself is an entire operating system too nowadays), takes up half a gig of disk space, and starts up in over 10 seconds with a multi-gigahertz multicore CPU.
Just perfect…
Ok boomer
Its a massive industry problem where code is so much more heavier where devs are reliant on brut hardware force rather than refining code to be light.
Not boomer sentiment at all
It’s been that way since the dawn of computing. Developers will push hardware to its limits and the hardware people will keep making a faster chip. A lot of software was laggy as hell back in the day. Not to mention, it didn’t have any features compared to the stuff now. Plus our shit would crash all the time and take down the whole PC. Sure, you run across some shockingly fast and good apps but those have always been few and far between.
Flatpaks have the concept of runtimes; instead of downloading the entire qt tooling for a qt app the app could just use the KDE runtime same goes for GTK with the Gnome runtime. Flatpaks also have dependencies which can be shared between multiple apps even when they are not part of their runtimes, they are called “baseapps”. Flatpak apps still use double the space my normal apps take on a fresh install, so I assume using appimages to replace them will leave no space on my SSD.
Before deciding to settle on using Flatpak I tried to search for appimage permissions and how to set them, but it seems there is no such thing? If that’s true then there’s another advantage for Flatpaks and Snaps.
Also with all due respect: Flatpak and Snap tooling are not maintained by Probonodb.
What do you mean by AppImage permissions? A sandboxing feature like “access only those directories, those /dev devices, …”
EDIT: obviously this isn’t just for AppImage, but I tested it with AppImage and it work well. Another tip: if you want a package manager for managing AppImage installations try zap (https://github.com/srevinsaju/zap)
In that case, take a look at bubblejail. (https://github.com/igo95862/bubblejail)
The best of them all, αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε.
Build once, run natively on literally any PC OS including Windows and MacOS!
Interesting read, love stuff like this but it seems they’d be a lot of dev overhead to truly make something large and agnostic but still gotta commend it!
openSUSE’s Richard Brown has given multiple talks over the years comparing these three. I’d suggest anyone to look at those for a great rundown on how these universal package managers compare to one another. His most recent talk can be found here; in which he actually does some kind of recap as well.
Flatpak works like a package manager but has program isolation as well.
- ruins single source of truth over installed state
- thus kills validation and thus consistency and thus repeatability (the holy trifecta of release management)
- promotes dependency hell
- promotes redundant installs
- ‘hides’ installs from enterprise management (eg snmp)
- you will fail the audit
But other than being redundant and risky, totally cool.
I hate all three. Why do we need to the same dependencies in a thousand different places? There’s gotta be something better between typical software repos and these stupid packed applications.
Flatpaks work by using a shared runtime, you don’t have the same dependencies in a thousand different places
debian repos are ok w/o using all this shit
My problem with all three is that trust, security, quality comes from package to package. There is no standard, and packages are isolated from each other. If there is an issue between multiple apps, developers just start pointing at each other. With distro like opensuse I know everything is tested properly including security bug coverage and package interoperability. I can even check it myself at openqa.opensuse.org
With flatpaks I am at mercy of each developer not being lazy and well informed about all current issues.
Flatpak provides updates, management tools, an ecosystem of common components that don’t need to be repackaged with every executable, dependency management, cleaning up unused dependencies, warnings when you are using obsolete packages, and so on
My problem with appimage is that they never work. Every time I tried one, best case scenario it crashed with a random error message. All attempts to fix them were damn near impossible to debug.
It honestly felt like they were not universal enough and still relied on certain libraries being available on OS. Hopefully I’m wrong because that would completely defeat their purpose. I stopped wasting time on them after Plex and VLC both failed to run reliably and switched to flatpak that “just works” 100% of the time.
To be honest most of the time I look for an rpm anyway. Flatpaks are always a last resort. I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed.
This was my experience as well as a developer trying to package an application as an appimage. Creating an appimage that works on your machine is easy. Creating one that actually works on other distros can be damn near impossible unless everything is statically linked and self contained in the first place. In contrast, flatpak’s developer experience is much easier and if it runs, you can be pretty sure it runs elsewhere as well.
what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
Appimages are great for what they do. They’d be even better if we had convenient means of distribution. It’s easy for an intermediate-to-advanced user to go find the thing on some website, download it then
chmod +xit.A regular user, in contrast, finds comfort in centralized software repositories, where you only have to enter an app’s name and click install. Gnome and KDE, with the help of Appstream, provide Flatpaks for your convenience through Software and Discover, respectively.
It’s worth mentioning that Alexander Larsson (Flatpak) took some inspiration from Simon Peter’s (Appimage) klik when he was developing the precursor to xdg-apps and Flatpak, glick… What a mouthful :) Cheers!
Can confirm. I like Flathub.
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I think AppImages suck as well, but this is not a reason for my dislike. A simple script that you can run on startup will fix that problem.
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You realize your computer won’t work without scripts, don’t you? And if you want your computer to do something it doesn’t do on its own, a simple script will make it do what you want. If that is your definition of sucking, then you need to go back to Windows, which is also loaded with scripts, by the way, so that sucks too.
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Use appimagelauncher Application that will add appimages to application menu
Use Gear Lever.
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Care to elaborate?
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Good talk
I like appimages because I can install them where I want and you can just make a symlink in the bin folder.
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