Didn’t know that measuring and comparing means I’m jumping thru hoops.

If you talking about the infrastructure cost, then yeah it flatpak would be ‘better’. since all your users would use the same runtime and you only have to ship the binary.

But this only makes sense for the first time the user downloads the application, because it turns out appimage can do delta updates just like flatpak lol

In practice not even the first point is true btw, a lot of flatpaks often ship bundled in dependencies (due to having compat issues with the flaptak runtime), so the donwload size of the .flatpak alone is similar or bigger than the one of the appimage.

Flatpak makes sense from a bandwidth and storage standpoint for end-users.

While flatpaks “share” dependencies, different flatpaks depend on different flatpak runtimes and even different versions of the same runtime, so it is actually the least efficient way to ship software.

https://pkgforge-dev.github.io/Anylinux-AppImages/disk-usage-vs-flatpak.html

what if you have an old-ass copy of SDL2 in that AppImage which doesn’t actually work very well on your system and breaks windowing, which I’ve actually seen happen?

flatpak suffers from this issue as well since most flatpak runtimes have less than 4 years of support (some like the GNOME runtime is only 1 year!).

More recently PPSSPP flatpak was broken because the flatpak runtime decided to replace SDL2 with sdl-compat which broke it: https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/issues/21075

yuzu also had a lot of issues with flatpak due to flatpak runtimes shipping outdated versions of mesa:

https://www.reddit.com/r/yuzu/comments/11307f0/glitches_on_steam_deck_flatpak_version_dont/j8o6gsa/

Also SDL is not well know for breaking its ABI, more likely what this person saw was the opssite, an issue in wayland that sdl-compat fixes and since the appimage shipped actual SDL2 there was no fix. Which is also the reason why a lot of distros now ship sdl-compat instead of sdl2 because it carries some fixes for wayland, but it can also break stuff badly lol

Topping off the shit salsa sandwich we find ourselves faced with in this situation is the fact that AppImage makes zero attempt to handle the problem of application distribution. It does not attempt to vindicate or expose your work to the end user

flatpak does not do that, flathub and the software stores are not part of flatpak.

Also kinda of crazy to say that appimage makes no attempt to fix application distribution when flatpak is just another docker and super bloated as result lol

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heh

This is because flatpak apps depend on flatpak runtimes, so the app will download the entire runtime it needs when you dont have it installed already.

This is bad because a lot of flatpak runtimes like the GNOME runtime only have one year of support, so you blow a lot of storage in practice