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?

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    822·
    11 months ago

    Software deployment that tackles dependency hell in a secure fashion while providing repeatable, atomic updates and rollback.

    AppImage doesn’t even provide a proper update system.

    • rutrum@lm.paradisus.dayEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        46·
        11 months ago

        You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It’s got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn’t a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can’t have any guarantees about the update process. You’re back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).

        • unalivejoyEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Unfortunately not many Flatpaks that I use properly implement the org.freedesktop.portal.Flatpak.UpdateMonitor portal. For reference, there’s a bug report for Firefox to use it.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
      32·
      11 months ago

      There’s software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the ‘whole package or nothing’ approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.