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27329ed9-2211-a1ba-9371-e2641bf0dcb6
Ranting about cringe AppImages again.

I'm tired telling people, who never built and deployed one, that it's not cross-distro portable software solution they expect.
4 comments
27329ed9-2211-a1ba-9371-e2641bf0dcb6
@katnjiapus no.

There is so much wrong about it. I do not recommend it, if it's possible literally any other solution will be better than AppImage.
[:babaKatt:] Cacofren :ironFront:​​:enbyCrossbow:​​:sparkles2:

@a1ba from a user perspective, AppImage is one of my favs. I don't have to worry about the image being unusable after several updates.

27329ed9-2211-a1ba-9371-e2641bf0dcb6
@katnjiapus the thing is, it easily can be unusable.

You just execute an SFX archive, and god knows what's inside. It's basically up to developer to ensure that their program won't break on most Linux distros, and also make it future-proof.

Let's say you run a Qt application. Qt has platform plugin system, there is one for X11, there is another for Wayland. What if developer who personally uses one of them didn't put a plugin for another? Can you fix it? Until you find a binary for the exact same Qt version, no.

Or let's say it's a game. It knows about both X11 and Wayland and should work everywhere, right? WRONG. If you use Mesa drivers, the dependency tree might be complex enough to be incompatible with included in AppImage dependencies. It was a problem for Steam Runtime until sniper, which addressed this problem.

Even Steam moved on, but AppImage didn't because AppImage is just a glorified SFX archive.
@katnjiapus the thing is, it easily can be unusable.

You just execute an SFX archive, and god knows what's inside. It's basically up to developer to ensure that their program won't break on most Linux distros, and also make it future-proof.
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