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?
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?
A bit of history. The first universal packaging format was snap by Canonical and used to be called Click apps and it was made for the Ubuntu mobile OS and later to the Ubuntu desktop. Red Hat in response to that created the FlatPak format. The AppImages are community effort. As you can see since both snap and FlatPak are developed and supported by a company they are more widely available and easier to search, install and update them. There are multiple tools for AppImages as well, which can search, install an update, however they are not pre installed or can be installed from the repo on most distro. There are dielstros which ship AppImage support by default with App Store for example Nitrux. You can use AppMan or bauh for managing AppImages. The AppMan has command line interface and bauh is a graphical application. Bauh can also manage snap and FlatPak.