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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
An example:
Application Payload = 100MB AppImage all inclusive image with deps = 175MB Flatpak App Layer = 101MB Flatpak Deps = 75MB
Now say you’re shipping 1000’s of similar applications with the same general dependency chains in bulk operations to things like end-user devices.
Flatpak wins. That’s the point.
This isn’t a discussion about an average Desktop user saving some disk space.
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
.flatpakalone is similar or bigger than the one of the appimage.🤣
My gawd. The hoops you jump through. Just take the L and walk on, slugger.
Didn’t know that measuring and comparing means I’m jumping thru hoops.
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…