linuxmemes

But yeah, sometimes I just compile from source, if needed.

My software, QuickDAV, is not in the AUR. It’s open source, and I release it only as an AppImage, because I am lazy.

Linux From Scratch user detected

AUR changed my life

Not a fan of AppImages myself. For an universal format it has surprising amount of issues with different distros, in my experience. And the whole Windows style "go to a website, download the AppImage, if you want to update it, go to the web page again and download it again" is one thing I wanted to get away from. At least they don't come with install wizards, that clicking through menus thing was a pain.

For one off stuff I run once and never need again, AppImage is alright. But not being built-in with sandboxing, repos, all that stuff, it just seems like a step back.

App images are a very Windows way to do things. They bundle everything so they are big

I much prefer our modern package format solutions:

1. sudo apt install something
2. open
3. wtf this is like 6 months old
4. find a PPA hosted by someone claiming to have packaged the new version
5. search how to install PPAs
6. sudo apt <I forgot>
7. install app finally
8. wtf it's 2 months old and full of bugs
9. repo tells me to report to original developer
10. report bugs
11. mfw original dev breaks my kneecaps for reporting a bug in out of date versions packed with weird dependency constraints they can't recreate

Mine is

AppImage > Native repos > AUR > Manually compiling from source > Finding an alternative

I don't like installing software that doesn't need to be installed, thus I like AppImage. Pretty portable. That also applies to compiling from source. Yes, my home directory is a mess.

Just use flatpak. It runs and installs local but still has the benefits of a package manager

The Firefox snap was the reason I left Ubuntu. (Or, the last straw, at least.) Fedora has been wonderful.

Try debian, they improved so much over the past decade, they're a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu now without any bullshit.

|sudo bash

Snaps are a standard for apps that Ubuntu's parent company, Canonical, has been trying to push for years.

The issue that most people have with them, is that Canonical controls the servers, which are closed source. Meaning that only they can distribute Snap software, which many Linux users feel violates the spirit & intention of the wider free and open source community.

Appimages and Flatpaks are fully open source standards, anybody can package their software in those ways and distribute them however they want.

.deb files are software packaged for the Debian distribution, and frequently also work with other distros that are based on Debian, like Linux Mint.

The primary thing I hate about them is that every snap package appears to your system as a separate mounted filesystem. So if you look in your file explorer, you can potentially see dozens of phantom drives clogging up your sidebar.

I don't think snaps are bad (and when someone tries to explain why they are, about 85% of the time they say something wrong enough that I suspect they're probably just parroting someone else rather than actually knowing what's going on). It's sad, because if we could get rid of the bullshit we could actually have decent discussions about the benefits and shortcomings of snaps (and how to fix those shortcomings).

On the .deb front: it's a package format made by Debian. Each archive contains a data tarball, which has the files in the package in their full structure from /, and a control tarball, which contains metadata such as name, version and dependencies as well as pre-install, pre-remove, post-install and post-remove scripts, which are used doing any setup or removal work that can't be done just by extracting or deleting the files.

The upside of deb files is that they tend to be pretty small. The downside is that this typically comes from having a tight coupling to library versions on the system, which means upgrading a library can break seemingly unrelated things. (This is why you get warnings like this page: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian) Many third party distributors (e.g. Google with Chrome) take care of this by packaging most dependencies inside the deb, inflating the size.

Another major difference between packages like debs and rpms and newer formats like snaps and flatpaks is that the latter have confinement systems to prevent apps from having full access to your system.