Snap, Flatpak and/or AppImages?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Hi,

AppImages are by principle a very simple technology, an archive
containing the application itself as well as its dependencies, together
with a code that will mount it at launch and start the app.


It works quite well.


The reason why accessibility tends to work out of the box is caused by
the lack of sandboxing.

Unlike Flatpak or Snap, which apply security control over their
packages, AppImages don't have such mechanisms as far as I know, and
thus applications can join AT stack just fine.


Though, another thing to note here is, that if one explicitly wants to
sandbox an AppImage, the process is simplified thanks to the fact that
most of things are on single place.

In fact, firejail as an example even has a flag for sandboxing AppImages.


The simplicity of the packaging process also means, that it's not a
problem to support architectures like ARM as far as the application
itself can be compiled for it.


And, while AppImages are by design meant to be portable and easily
distributable, managing these things tends to become a drag relatively
quickly when there is more of them, so there are dedicated managers for
AppImages as well as repositories, which can automate things like
installation, uninstallation, icons creation, updates etc.


So it's possible to achieve experience similar to apt, Flatpak, Snap or
others.


Best regards


Rastislav