Linux Questions

Do you know how binfmt_misc works?

I looked at the wiki and it seems to mention that. I don't think that was there yesterday? Well, anyway, still depends on the wrapper script and binfmt_misc being set up and configured as opposed to the intended no hassle download and run style that it is meant to work on all distros. It's basically the same as flatpak here (with slightly more configuration), although unlike flatpak the apps won't show up in my DE without manual work.

AppImage instead tried to target the most common linux systems, which back then 99.99% of the time was going to be an FHS filesystem with glibc. glibc guarantees backwards compatibility*** so they made the rational decision (back then) of relying on some host dependencies and what not.

fastforward to 2025 and now linux is no longer that, you cannot even expect a system to be GNU/linux at all, nobody follows the FHS fully anymore. So the only thing you can complain about here is that appimage hasn't moved fast enough to these changes but this is just a 100% community project, I think only KDE has contributed to appimage meaningfully in the past, there is nothing the likes of Red Hat or Canonical behind the project unlike flatpak and snap.

I mean, fundamentally, if apps packaged with a distro-agnostic packaging system cannot be relied on to be distro-agnostic, the packaging system isn't really distro-agnostic. They may have had reasonable expectations when it was originally made, but like much software, their expectations were incorrect, so now we're in a limbo land where some apps might work fine, but others require distro-specific wrappers that may or may not even exist. For instance, while it's possible to run them on Guix System, there's AFAIK no actual wrapper script, so you need to manually create the FHS env using guix shell --container --emulate-fhs blah blah blah and expose a bunch of directories and env vars to the container. In a system without that functionality (to emulate an FHS environment), you'd just be SOL. You could maybe get it working using like distrobox or something, but at that point you might as well just download the app using the distrobox env's native package manager or whatever (note I haven't personally used distrobox).

Also, I admittedly don't like the download and run model, since that's been an easy way to download malware historically. Might be easier to convince some people to use Linux with it though because it's "familiar," although now since there are app stores on Windows and macOS and phones and so on, an app store should probably be familiar enough to most people.