I don't really get the point of the blog, honestly, because in the first part they are railing against one angle, then reverse and argue FOR it in a sense by saying Flatpak just works. Of course it does. That's it's job.

AppImage also just works, but there is a fundamental difference in the delta of what you get as a payload. AppImage has EVERYTHING the image needs to run. Flatpaks only contain the running code and custom dependencies, then it's manager solves for shared libraries and generics from commonly available layers to download and run to solve for those deps.

Both make sense depending on how you feel you need to tackle the problem.

Where the author kid of goes off the rails is complaining that somehow either camp is somehow responsible for their product being popular enough to survive and be taken up by Valve. In this specific case, Valve is intending to include simple packaging for games and libraries they intend to ship to millions of cross platform devices. Flatpak makes sense from a bandwidth and storage standpoint for end-users.

AppImage does not. No idea why this person is taking issue with that.

[–] SamueruSama@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] blackbrook@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think their point, in the first part at least before going off on ideology, is that appimage makes things a lot harder for developers. At least I think that's their point, the rantiness makes it hard to distinguish technical points from the idealogical...