Flatpak is over-engineered garbage. You still can't even install things on different disks without setting up an entirely new 'installation' or whatever they call it. And you still need a repo. Meanwhile I can trivially make most Windows software work from a USB drive I can carry around between computers.

AppImage can do that too, since it is a lot less over-engineered, but sadly very few developers use AppImage and it even distributions like Nitriux that claim to support AppImages don't display icons for them. Could be trivially solved with a standard for embedding icons in ELF, but the unix world hates the very concept of a program that isn't spread all over the file hierarchy and isn't full of hard-coded paths so it'll never happen.

I'm surprised to find that you have good luck with that; last time I looked, it was a nightmare for anything that didn't explicitly support portable mode because everything expects to save stuff into the registry.

There are several tools to help with that, like the PortableApps.com launcher, JauntePE, or even Cameyo. Programs that just use config files can usually be dealt with without those kinds of wrappers by changing an environment variable. But if you don't mind not bringing the config with you (and it often isn't an issue in my experience), you can usually just drop the folder on the drive and you're done.

> Flatpak is over-engineered garbage.

But, it works, especially for the use case of the "I need the latest and greatest versions of two packages".

> AppImage can do that too, since it is a lot less over-engineered, but sadly very few developers use AppImage and it even distributions like Nitriux that claim to support AppImages don't display icons for them.

So, use one of the other 20 distros where AppImages just work, perfectly, out-the-box.

Ignoring the issue with the oft-used fallback of distro roulette as a Linux evangelist defense mechanism, it isn't that they don't work, it's that their icons aren't displayed. There is not a single distro, including the ones that actually supposedly embrace AppImage, which displays AppImage icons correctly.