this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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    Flatpak haters seem to believe that if an app isn't on their distro's repos, it's the developers' fault. (lemmy.world)
    submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    So, like, dumb question. People here assumed that I mean AppImages, whereas I actually meant just a statically linked binary. Is that really the only reason why AppImage exists? So, that dynamically linked applications can be distributed like statically linked ones?

    [–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    You cannot statically link everything. Take graphics libraries and APIs for example, do you statically link against nvidia's or mesa's opengl?

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, but presumably AppImage/Flatpak/Docker cannot help with that either...?

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Flatpak solves the problem with targetable platform versions, you just update the manifest for your app every like 6-12 months to target the new one

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Ah, interesting. So, it's different from just statically linking against the latest driver lib every 6-12 months, because the Flatpak runtime gives you a bit of a guarantee that there won't be breaking changes in the meantime.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Bingo, and if the latest mesa breaks your app for example, you can target an older one until it's fixed instead of end users having to fuck around downgrading system packages

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

    This is the problem those tools try to solve. They package everything else upon which software might depend that can’t simply be linked into a single binary.

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    The majority of AppImages I've seen have been dynamically linked, yes. But it's also used for packaging assets.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

    Yeah, alright, packaging assets makes sense. I've always been fine with just a .tar.gz, but having it be a singular file without compression is cool.

    I guess, since AppImage emulates a filesystem, you can also have your application logic load the assets from the same path as if the assets were installed on the OS, so that's also cool.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

    You cannot statically link everything. Take graphics libraries and APIs for example, do you statically link against nvidia's or mesa's opengl?