Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
My problem with appimage is that they never work. Every time I tried one, best case scenario it crashed with a random error message. All attempts to fix them were damn near impossible to debug.
It honestly felt like they were not universal enough and still relied on certain libraries being available on OS. Hopefully I’m wrong because that would completely defeat their purpose. I stopped wasting time on them after Plex and VLC both failed to run reliably and switched to flatpak that “just works” 100% of the time.
To be honest most of the time I look for an rpm anyway. Flatpaks are always a last resort. I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed.
This was my experience as well as a developer trying to package an application as an appimage. Creating an appimage that works on your machine is easy. Creating one that actually works on other distros can be damn near impossible unless everything is statically linked and self contained in the first place. In contrast, flatpak’s developer experience is much easier and if it runs, you can be pretty sure it runs elsewhere as well.