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.

  • Atemu
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    10 months ago

    I don’t get why we didn’t just do it macOS style; bundle everything into one directory with a standardised structure and wire up file managers etc. to run the correct executable inside it.

    • Kazumara@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Because the FHS is a more sensible organization of files. Not every user needs to have their own executable for each program, that’s a mess.

      • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        macOS has both, a system wide /Applications and per-user ~/Applications. Not to mention that it doesn’t really matter on a single user system anyway.

      • Atemu
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        10 months ago

        Proper, integrated packaging is obviously preferred (though as a NixOS user I disagree that that implies an FHS) but this is about “stand-alone” packages. You’re missing the point.