sudo apt install

otherwise I like appimages because they are selfcontained and portable. I don't like to have things installed all over the OS. I like standalone or like choco were I can list, it's contained and i say remove this app, and it cleans it all.

Angry turk’s opinion

Flatpak/appimages fixed the fragmentation pain, but discovery is still a maze. missed opportunity: a curated storefront with builtin Lightning payments so developers get paid instead of doing open source charity forever.

My preference is AppImage if available otherwise I go with the distro default and as last resort 'sudo apt install'. AppImage works great because I run one main host with numerous VMs serving different functions. I locate the AppImage on one disk shared to all VMs. The one install and execute from any VM instance is the big sell point for me. I'm using Pop!_OS 24.04 mostly and it defaults to using either Flatpak or 'sudo apt install'. An initial pain point for me with Flatpak is it stores the binaries in a unique location. To execute any flatpak installed binary for automation purpose, one has to execute 'flatpak run <appname>'. I think the missed opportunity by most developers is not generating an AppImage for their application. It might just be me but I don't like applications pooping all over my hard disk.

I know a lot of people would like apt install. I personally think the best experience is something like Openclaw. Just copy paste a 1 line into the terminal.

apt or flatpak... Or download from whatever source website and verify. Sparrow Wallet has a nice tool for checking downloads. Haven't had much success with AppImage for some reason. Probably missed a step.

Curl, brew, npm or apt get. 🚬

Flatpak and Flathub have solved the app distribution issue on most distros. People can fight it or come up with something better which I doubt is happening in the near future... maybe Kaiming if Chinese companies invest in it.

Install from source, apt, sometimes snap

Snappy (snap packages), yes it is canonical yes the store is not really open but technically the best solution (from point of security). And it ships possibly to all important Linux Distros.

I get it using the distro's package manager. That's it. If something is not there, or I need a bleeding edge version, I use flatpak. Overtime I found that this approach works very well for me.

I just use nixpkgs, all the packages are hash-verified. Cool

I typically go with whatever the app maker recommends. RPM is common. Flatpaks are common. AppImage is less common. Sometimes you get a tarball but that is way less common than it used to be. Flathub (as a flatpak source) has gotten a lot better, but I like to make sure a Dev is the one who actually posted software there or it was done by a trustworthy group. Of course there's some trust there. Can't escape that. Building from source is probably the safest route but it is more time consuming.

paru btw

Slackware user here and a lot already comes with it. And those not I'll build from source or search in slackbuilds

You should check out extrepo. Extrepo search Extrepo add Apt install The coolest thing in linux package management and it gets very little love.

More people should set up repos and get added to extrepo instead of publishing a .deb and expecting us to dpkg -i

I learned reprepro and had my own repo (apt get) for a few years. Woowee was upgrading things annoying. Until I got into automation with bash! I mostly build from source, or sometime grab binaries from git if they build for my architecture.

Those of us who haven't taken on the mark of the Debian thank you for this sane practice. The amount of times I have to go digging for actual source distributions because the download page is a deb, a snap, and a flatpak... I get nobody ships txz's but a tarball should ALWAYS be one option.

A package format around tarballs? You mean like, the way the oldest distribution in existence has always done it which nobody could help themselves but to find a worse way to do things??

I've literally reverted to using discord in a browser.

Probably half my system is built from source, using slackbuilds. The rest either included or from alienbob's repo. It can be a pain for big stuff. Once in a blue moon it even makes sense to deb2tgz but it can be a little messy.

To express my dedication to tarballs 📝 7fd76f2a…

I guess I do use dpkg too