Linux

I agree with much of this. However, regardless of which platform you're on. it's best to follow the design patterns of that platform.

Putting binaries on your desktop is not in keeping with Linux design patterns, nor are self-updating apps. I think those are fair points.

Having dozens of apps all using their own update mechanism introduces unnecessary complexity, which can be exploited. This has been a problem on Mac and Windows over the years. On Mac, for example, a common solution to this is the Sparkle framework, which devs can use in their app to manage self-updating; but Sparkle itself has been exploited, so then you have apps out there running god-knows-what-version of Sparkle in their bundles, leaving users vulnerable with no good way to identify or remediate it. This is why I typically disable any self-updating feature in any apps I use.

Dont know where user installed tar archives (with statically linked binaries or including deps) would have dep conflicts, maybe if they are not statically linked.

The self updating stuff and desktop icons is personal opinion and not the common way on Desktop Linux, so I skip that.

you could do something like obtanium for android which could easily automate the process.

That is called a package manager, with a repo, with gpg signing etc. On Android (which I mentioned) updates are secure. Let alone the point that appimages are not updated in a regular way, they are just replaced.

I'd argue it makes little difference. But yes, Downloading things from the internet is more unsafe

No the difference is huge. If you are used to downloading software from websites, a faked website can easily lead to downloaded malware. Flathub can be added with a click and flatpak is included in distros, which means no hunting on the internet and no accidental clicks.

And as I said, until nobody downloads .flatpak packages online, and there may be an occasion where this is normal behavior, people will believe malware links are legit.

the risks seem blown out of proportion here. As long as you are downloading from the same place, the risks are significantly smaller in reality, not gone, but smaller.

Appimages are distributed everywhere, just as .exe files for Windows. This means they are favored by developers used to Windows and Mac, and those will not add them to a repo instead.

So a faked website of whatever etcher or something is easy.

The fact that Linux malware is not a thing, while Appimages clearly give the headstart for that, is a miracle.

I find this to be a benefit myself, I have had countless headaches with flatpak applications and their sandboxing. everything

Flatpaks are not secure because their sandboxes are weakened to not have such issues. This is due to apps not following secure standards, and until that is fixed they are insecure or broken or both. (Apps need to write configs in the container, they should use portals etc.)

I maintain a list of flatpak apps following modern standards, which is a small portion but getting better.

Linux is only somewhat secure because everything is FOSS and comes from repos.

This is broken by appimages, that can easily distribute malware and thus fix the "my malware is not running on that distro" issue.

Every software that can write to your .bashrc can easily catch your sudo password.

Another moot issue. $HOME/.local/bin is an XDG standard, so unless we pretend that XDG standards aren't "one of the major standards" this is just wrong.

Yes linux experts would put them there. As mentioned in that text malware would also install itself there, so on secure systems this should be only writable by root/ some elevated group privilege.

But apart from that users put them on the desktop, or in some random folder, I mean that dir is hidden for a reason.

Or put it in that PATH and then link to the desktop, resulting in a broken link when you remove the app.

When you need only a couple appimage files, space I find is smaller then flatpak, it only becomes when you need a lot of applications.

If something is not scaleable its not a good concept. The fact that you will only install a couple of appimage apps is enough proof.

On modern atomic distros users can rely purely on flatpak.

Btw see the linked dedup checker. You may download more dependencies but they are linked between each other and not actually take up so much space.

I don't need to worry about installing and uninstalling application when I just want to try it

We need to overthink those habits. You dont just "try an app", you run unsandboxed code from an unverified origin. As mentioned above, this could be totally fine, and also add a function to your bashrc that catches your sudo password (the next time you use it) and sends it to a server.

The secure way to do that is completely unpractical.

1. Get a GPG app or use the cli, create a personal key. Secure the access permissions, as gpg always complains on Fedora for example.
2. Hunt the internet for the gpg key of the dev
3. Look for at least another source of that key like GrapheneOS does it
4. Compare those keys hashes using cli or some app
5. When correct, load the key into gpg/kleopatra/kgpg
6. Verify the key with your internal key (yeah gpg is overcomplicated)
7. Download the appimage, and a signed hash (most of the time its done like that)
8. Verify the signed hash
9. Sandbox the appimage using bubblejail (doesnt work) or firejail (no idea if it works, and its insecure)
10. Repeat on every damn update (if it doesnt have a builtin updater)

This is unusable. And repositories do this automatically without anything you need to do. For sure you could "extra check the website" and say "

Also app data will be everywhere, often in its traditional location, while there is no package manager at all to delete them. Flatpaks store all their stuff (when devs care and not just ignore that, cough Cryptomator) in their container and data can be easily removed during uninstallation, GUI stores show a popup to delete data and I also made a small script to do that.

And that "try it out" app will either have no desktop entry or that entry needs to be manually and will be still there after uninstalling.

I don't need to muck about trying to get an app into flathub or starting my own repo, when a user has a problem, I can just tell them to run the new appimage instead of trying to get them to compile it.

This may be a reason, but this is only for testing then. But for sure, when its a small project, getting it on Flathub may be much efford.

I can imagine the developer experience is easiser. Flatpaks are simply very "defined" and need all that metadata and more to be complete. But needing to use available runtimes is a good thing mostly, its basically supporting a specific distro.

Flatpak through CLI is fine (I would like to have a standalone small store just for flatpak), Discover is nice too. The Linux Mint store also seemed fine but not much experience. (Linux Mint has some Wayland support now, so there is a secureblue Cinnamon spin, have to try that). The Cosmic store is just a stub currently, lets see!

Cheers!