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.
I’m a Flatpak user myself, but a lot of those arguments against AppImage are outdated or invalid. Here are my counterpoints:
GearLever solves all the problems mentioned.
There are AppImages out there that self-update , but GearLever also solves the update issue. And if you don’t want to use GearLever, there are other updaters like AppImageUpdate.
This is blatantly wrong - AppImageHub exists for this very reason. There are also GUI frontends like AppImagePool which makes it easy to discover/download/install them.
That is a fair point, however, AppImage never claimed to be a sandboxing solution, and for some use-cases this can even be seen as an advantage (any Flatpak user would’ve at some point run into annoying sandboxing limitations - such as password manager and browser integration, or themeing woes). But there are other sandboxing options out there, such as using containers, and IMO, using a proper container is a better option for sandboxing. Or even better, use a VM if you’re actually running an untrusted app.
I completely disagree with making the entirety of /home as non-executable, when
$HOME/.local/binis recommended by the XDG standard as a place to store executables. As long as$HOME/.local/binis in the XDG spec, I’ll continue storing my executables there. If you disagree, go argue with the XDG guys.This is a fair point but “they include all the libraries they need” is the entire point of AppImage - so mentioning this is pointless.
Then it’s a good thing that they don’t right? What’s the point of making hypothetical arguments? Also, this is 2024, storage is cheap and dedicating space for your applications isn’t really a big deal for most folks. And if storage space is really a that much of a concern, then you wouldn’t be using Flatpak either - so this argument is moot and only really valid for a hypothetical / rare use-cases where storage is a premium. And again, in such a use case, that user wouldn’t be using Flatpaks either.
Finally, some distros like Bazzite already have the above integrations built-in (GearLever/AppImagePool), so you don’t even need to do anything special to get AppImages integrated nicely in your system, and there’s nothing stopping other distros adding these packages as optional dependencies - but it’s kinda moot at this point I guess since Flatpak has already won the war.
Personally, I’m pro-choice. If AppImage doesn’t work for you, then don’t use it, as simple as that. Stop dictating user choice. If AppImage is really as bad as you claim, then it’ll die a natural death and you don’t have to worry about it. What you really need to worry about is Snap, which has the backing of Canonical, and some dev houses new to the Linux ecosystem seem to think packing stuff as Snap is an acceptable solution…
This is how you bring your thoughts to the table. Awesome information that I certainly did not have. Thanks man.
I agree with you on all but one point: I detest the argument that “storage is cheap”.
While true, it’s of no value to have 10 times the storage when all your apps grow 10 times in size. You can still only do as much as before but had to upgrade in between. This also means, it leaves behind people who simply can’t afford an upgrade and who have an otherwise running system.
On top of that, we live in a time where we should not waste resources, since the world already suffers enough.
I am therefore still a fan of optimizing software to be as efficient as possible.
That being said: carefully used AppImages solve one such issue for me. Not every application I use needs constant updates. I want to stay at a specific version. That’s easy with AppImages.
Hehe.
“Bloat” is one big topic around these newer packaging formats so definitely not a pointless thing to bring up imo. I don’t think it should be as big of a topic as it is (the actual issue here is fairly minor imo) but it is definitely talked about.
And flatpak (and snap I think) have much better tools to mitigate the space use issues.
Sceptical but I will try it for sure.
It makes appimages less worse than Flatpaks though, so its only “badness reduction” for me.
The first is what I mentioned, such updates can be perfectly done by a central package manager. Did you ever try to seal off a Windows install using Portmaster, where every installed app needed network access for their individual update services? Just no…
Ans to the repos, yeah maybe, havent looked if they are as secure as a linux repo. But the concept of “it is acceptable to download software from random websites” allows for malware to fit in there. Only if you will never find a .flatpak file it is possible to be sure its malware.
All worse than bubblewrap. Containers are either manual af (like with bubblejail) or if you refer to Distrobox/Toolbox, unconfined by default. They have no portal integration and no GUI configuration apps. So it may work somehow but probably worse, more resource heavy and there simply already is something better.
Same for VMs. Keep an eye on Kata containers, but this is about least privilege, not some QubesOS system that will not run in a tablet, for example. Android uses containers, is damn secure, and runs on phones.
This is about protecting against malware. Linux Desktops are built on a different logic. Any unconfined software can download a binary to localbin, copy a random desktop entry from usrshareapps to your local folder, edit the exec line and add that binary to it.
Or just manipulate your .bashrc, change the sudo command to read input, save to file, pipe input to sudo. Tadaa, sudo password stolen.
That concept of “users can change their home but not the system” is poorly pretty flawed. So any directory that is writable without any priveges is insecure, if you dont trust every single piece of software you run.
Agree that Snaps are a problem. Its only really problematic when repackaging is illegal though, of course annoying but the Spotify flatpak is a repackaged snap. Same as with appimages.
I should write the same about snaps, but I feel they are covered WAY better.
This tool also good
https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM
Dont spam please
While I overall do prefer Flatpak over AppImage these days, the sandboxing has indeed been giving me more trouble than I think it is worth so far.
Oooh yes, let’s throw some mud in the gaping holes of this packaging solution, spit and tape the rest to make it do something it was not designed to do. Brilliant idea! ☺️
Ate em up
Yeah, it is also interesting how people do not see in eyes of developers.