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.
Appimages come with the library dependencies, flatpaks come with that + multiple versions of the runtimes and drivers. Flatpaks make the most sense if all you use it’s that, otherwise you will have 5 different versions of mesa, gnome runtime, video codec libraries and other runtimes for little reason.
When you’re talking about bloat you meant when using just one or at best a few apps and otherwise using repo packages? I was more thinking as a replacement for repo stuff, with 5+ apps. The more you have flatpaks the better the advantage of them over AppImage would be with dedupping and shared runtimes.
The dedupping works between different runtimes and whatnot too btw. So two versions of gnome runtime don’t actually use all that space they claim they do, just what has changed between them.
Not to mention the savings when it comes to download size over time. Unless they’ve made some delta download system for AppImages, which would be pretty cool.