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.
Now I WILL get judged for this but hear me out… AppImages are useful for apps that will not get on Flathub. If you have an app that cannot get on Flathub (like a pirated Minecraft Launcher), you will be thankful developers are using AppImages for them. In this case, they’re unlikely to use snaps (alt repos for snap are possible but difficult from what I’ve heard) and maintaining a flatpak repo just seems like overkill for a single program. So for cases like these, I’m glad to see these packaged as appimages
Okay fair point. Piracy, illegal content etc. will all get removed from Flathub.
Similar to another comment about archiving software that may get removed
As far as I know flatpak applications can be distributed as a file without the need for a repository, just like .deb or .rpm files
Can they? I’ll be honest, I’m not that familiar with how flatpak works on a more technical level.