Disclaimer
Flatpak uses OSTree, like Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite etc) and similar to BTRFS snapshots.
So many files are deduplicated and linked, not actually there
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
I dont think that is true at all. Appimages are slowest and have many disadvantages like
I always use the app image if they are available. As for being slow I never noticed.
No app desktop entry is one on the reasons I like them. If its one I use a lot I make a hotkey to open it. But there are ways to add them. There is even a tool that makes its easy to do.
No updates. I’m not sure how exactly, but everyone I use auto updates when I open them. I originally had a issue of it breaking my hotkey cause the file name would change because of the version number going up. Which I fixed by using a *.
The appimages I used dont autoupdate. But even if, you are in some weird “windows is bad” state from years ago, before the MS Store, and even without desktop entries.
There simply is no reason for appimages other than on systems like Tails that are not made to install apps. But I also think Tails is pretty annoying and should allow flatpak installs in the permanent storage partition.
There was an app that dealt with desktop entry and auto-update but it hasn’t bee updated since a few years already.
Can be remedied with an official store/ being distrubuted by the devs themselves instead of random people. Appimage isn’t getting a tenth of the support flatpak is getting.
Might worth it if you have dozens of very heavy apps but it’s totally not the case if you only need a few simple programs.
Yes, Appimages lost the race. The apps are old afaik, and often dont work. It sucks when distributors use Appimages as they are simply a bad app format.
There is a way to convert Appimages to Flatpaks, but I havent got that complete.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Appimage-To-Flatpak
they can be added manually but yeah i get how that’s inconvenient.
just run
./appimage.appimage --appimage-extractand you have the .desktop file there, then just edit the path to the executableYes but that is unimportant. This is not user friendly at all. I do that all the time for random stuff, but especially on GNOME the system hides stuff like that away from users and thats okay.