A magnetised needle and a steady hand is a better package format.

Let the hate of the crowd wash over me, but I don't even like Flatpak, and I've got love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with AppImage as well.

Just give me a system package or a zipped tarball.

In recent years, have had to just get used to needing to build most projects from source.

Are there enough watermarks on this meme? At least we got reddit covered.

A stab at my personal ranking: .deb > appimage > flatpack > curling a shell script

I can't help but love a .deb file (even when not via repo), I've almost exclusively used Debian and it derivatives since the late 90s. And snap isn't on the list because it got stored in a loopback device I removed.

my issue with snaps is honestly just that they are controlled too much by just one entity (canonical) and there is no reason for them to exist because flatpak already does everything they do.

Nix is just across the street sipping tea because it understands what it is and is at peace with the chaotic world around it.

If flatpak didn't make me put the entirety of KDE onto my system (thats an exaggeration but you know what I mean) I'd gladly crown it king of the package managers.

I have really started to like AppImage. You just download a single file make it executable and it just works.

I use Cursor for coding, and it has an appimage that replaces itself when it updates.

I tried a snap package on my pop-os system once & it poo'ed folders all over my system, then didn't actually uninstall when I uninstalled it.

No thank you.

I need nothing but apt or dnf. Miss me with that other junk.

AppImage is the no-nonsense universal package format.

A rusty bucket riddled with holes and the stick part of a shovel is better than snap for running software.

.tar.gz should be appimage.

Why tf does every app have to mount itself as a virtual block device?

Flatpak and SystemD Portable services are actually pretty good.

That's the direction I see Linux going. I personally use NixOS because I am sad.

Tar is not a package manager, it is just a packaging format. AppImage has the same problem.

Flatpak is a bit of a crappy package manager but at least it is one. And, due to its use of container technology, it allows the same packages to run on any Linux kernel (any Linux distro). That is pretty useful.

Of the other package managers, apk 3 is my favourite but the only distro that uses it is Chimera Linux. Pacman is good. dnf / RPM is ok. apt / deb is in last place for me. The recent Ubuntu 25.04 launch snafu illustrates some of the problems with apt. The first Linus Tech Tips Linux challenge really highlighted the dangers of apt.

I only used snap briefly but instantly hated it. Fstab was a mess. It was slow. It was proprietary. I fled before I could form an educated opinion.

I really like flatpak and it's system, but AppImages are in a nice second place. I usually look for a flatpak first and appimages if I can't find the first.

That's because we are...

If .y Firefox will once again be updated without asking me and then refusing to open any page without a restart I'll fucking lose it