[bionade24]

First of of all, I don't like Snap or Flatpak. I'm only really interested rpm-ostree as used in Fedora CoreOS and Silverblue. I don't hate Appimages, you're claim that they're "fundamentally different" is just hypocritical.

> The purpose of an AppImage is simply to condense such a tarball to a single runnable file, for convenience - nothing more.

This still forces the user to learn the internals if the AppImage doesn't work. E.g. if MATLAB would use Appimage, I'd have to extract squashfs contents, fix the broken libraries inside and the repackage it. Or I would have to write a script to start the executable outside. It's a simpler from a pure technical standpoint when it's a tarball + wrapper script.

> Snap permanently runs a daemon, and Flatpak requires you to run programs with "flatpak run" - yuck!

Snap has many issues Canonical just refuses to solve (e.g. users without home under /home), so I just ignore that. What flatpak does is arguably exactly what Appimage does, a wrapper script. Maybe more complex, but with additional features and the it's the same script for all packages. If you have 100 AppImages installed, you have the same thing as "flatpak run" in up to 100 slightly different versions. I can't see how that reduces complexity.