[Wowfunhappy]

AppImage makes me nervous because they don't actually create promise cross distro compatibility—it depends on what libraries the developer decides to ship alongside the AppImage, and which they assume the distro has. This also raises questions about forwards compatibility with future OS releases.

Snap and Flatpak, by contrast, have explicit systems in place to prevent this. Of the two, I much prefer Flatpak for being a community-driven project. Also, Snap doesn't let you disable automatic updates (without hacks to your hosts file or such). Whatever you think about the security implications, this feels very against the Linux ethos of the user always retaining ultimate control.

[ktpsns]

On the other hand, AppImages are dead easy. They do not assume any host infrastructure installed which is especially handy if you are lacking root on a shared system.

[Wowfunhappy]

I'd prefer we just standardized around Flatpak being installed by default on most distros. Once the base package is installed, you can also install Flatpak apps without root. AppImage's won't work either if certain base packages haven't been installed (by a root user), like FUSE.