> I find Appimage to be better alternative to Flatpak
Me too.
But there is a "bigger picture" view of this which I think is important and relevant:
• AppImage encapsulates apps' requirements using the app bundle format from the ROX desktop: https://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/
• ROX borrowed the idea of app bundles from Acorn's RISC OS, which is still around and is FOSS now: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
• The RISC OS desktop treats folders whose names begin with a pling (`!`, an exclamation mark) specially. It expects a structure inside with an icon, a launcher script, etc.
• RISC OS also had an "icon bar", a forerunner of the Windows taskbar
• One of the Acorn engineers who worked on RISC OS was head-hunted to NeXT Computer in California. He took his Archimedes with him.
Source: an interview I arranged: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/
• About a year later, Steve Jobs demonstrated NeXTstep 0.8 with a Dock
• NeXTstep also has app bundles, demarked by a folder called $NAME.app instead of !$NAME
This is a pervasive and influential idea. It's how macOS apps work and that can be traced to RISC OS.
NeXT style bundles are available and work on Linux if you have GNUstep. There are 2 extant GNUstep desktops:
https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
But there is a distro which takes this idea much further and packages the _entire Linux OS_ in app-bundle directories:
https://gobolinux.org/
I think the makers of Flatpak, Nix, Guix, and Spack -- https://spack.io/ -- all really ought to take a deep look at ROX, AppImage, and GoboLinux.
What all of these do can be done better, in a more human-readable way, if you throw away ancient UNIX assumptions about filesystem directory hierarchies.
This was mostly not designed and was in historical fact accidental anyway:
https://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/07...