• flatbield@beehaw.org
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    6 hours ago

    Actually I both do and do not understand why they exist. I use Debian based distros and do not use either well except when I am using Ubuntu which is forcing more and more snaps.

    I do actually use exactly one appimage. I use to use the snap but found it was not that stable. One also generally has to have relatively new distro releases too as both flatpack and snap need to be fairly current which can be problem for near EOL Debian stable. Hence neither flatpack nor snap is that portable.

    Where flatpacks and snaps look a lot better is smaller distros with smaller repos. Hence, not that interesting for Debian based distros.

    • desentizised@lemm.ee
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      2 hours ago

      I love The Debian Project as an entity and I hope it exists until the end of time. I have this old 2005ish Sony Vaio which was built right at the cusp of the switch to x64 and thanks to Debian (who I believe are the only ones who still do 32 bit builds) I was able to bring my nostalgia for the device into a modern age. But I digress.

      I think ultimately we need to find a way to make dependency conflicts a thing of the past. Just install two versions of the same library if 2 of my programs need different ones. Maybe I’m thinking too naively about this and of course this isn’t something you could do on an immutable system, but if we’re talking Linux as a concept there are definitely some common practices today no one would’ve even considered 15 years ago. We need to make it irrelevant whether my installer is called pacman, zypper, apt, dnf or what have you. AppImages can give us that freedom and portability right now. Maybe we could combine the convenience of packaged apps with the beauty of centralized package management.