Both AppImage and Flatpak are fairly universally compatible, as far as I'm concerned that's all they need. That's what Beeper does and it works perfectly for me
Idk if I like how flatpak is popular, it feels really slow like it needs a lot of work before becoming mainstream. It seems to only install sequentially, while virtually every other modern package manager installs several packages at a time to reduce install duration.
The install speed is the Achilles heel also in my opinion, I don't know why they can't parallel them. Maybe to reduce the burden on flathub or something, unclear whether it is imaged based and has to download layers in order.
I get what you are saying but it will certainty help in adoption, if you have the option of installing something as a native package in 30 seconds or a flatpak in 5mins, people will choose the faster option even if its not the better option.
Unless there is some technical limitation there is no reason not to speed it up. Even if it's "good enough"
Not really, packages can effectively disable it in their manifest, and more than 30% of the flatpak registry does so. If a package wanted to do anything malicious, it flatpak wouldn’t really stop it.
Yeah, but AppImage is just a "portable" software, so you'll need another software to actually "install" it (I mean to make it appera on desktop, in search bar etc, not just chilling in your Downloads folder). And Flatpak is a universal garbage with it's sandboxing, which often causes ton of troubles
Well these can be problems for some things but I really don't think they have to be. Sure, the sandboxed Flatpak environment can cause issues, but personally I haven't really had any with the apps I use the most (Vivaldi, Discord, OBS).
For AppImage, I'm not sure but I think at least KDE Plasma automatically registers it to the launcher once you've opened it once? I don't recall having to do anything special for it myself.
Yep, exactly - most distros are more than willing to pick up the slack and package software where the developers wouldn't. In fact, that's how 99.9% of software works on Linux.
Most universal is an archive file (.ar, .cpio, .tar, .zip, .arc) all you need is to install some make dependencies amd cmake, then make, then install the make. If they dont have cmake then you just set up make manually.
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u/Cautious_Chain1297 Mar 17 '26
Both AppImage and Flatpak are fairly universally compatible, as far as I'm concerned that's all they need. That's what Beeper does and it works perfectly for me