I can only speak for Flatpak, but I found its packaging workflow and restricted runtime terrible to work with. Lots of undocumented/hard to find behaviour and very painful to integrate with existing package managers (e.g. vcpkg).

Yeah, flatpak has some good ideas, and they're even mostly well executed, but once you start trying to build your own flatpaks or look under the hood there's a lot of "magic". (Examples: Where do runtimes come from? I couldn't find any docs other than a note that says to not worry about it because you should never ever try to make your own, and I couldn't even figure out the git repos that appear to create the official ones. How do you build software? Well, mostly you plug it into the existing buildsystems and hope that works, though I mostly resorted to `buildsystem: simple` and doing it by hand.) For bonus points, I'm pretty sure 1. flatpaks are actually pretty conceptually simple; the whole base is in /usr and the whole app is in /app and that's it, and 2. the whole thing could have been a thin wrapper over docker/podman like x11docker taken in a slightly different direction.

You can build your own flatpak by wrapping bwrap, because that is what Flatpak does. Flatpak seems to have some "convenience things" like the various *-SDK packages, but I don't know how much convenience that provides.

The flatpak ecosystem is problematic in that most packages are granted too much rights by default.

Not sure what you're talking about, Flatpak runtimes are easy to find and contribute to: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

I wasn't directly involved, but the company I worked for has created its own set of runtimes too and I haven't heard any excessive complaints on internal chats, so I don't think it's as arcane as you make it sound either.

Well flatpak was started pre oci. But its core is is just ostree + bwrap. Bwrap does the sandboxing and ostree handles the storage and mount. Now there still a few more stuff but these 2 are the equivalent to docker. Bwrap is also used for steam and some other sandboxing usecases. Ostree is the core of fedora silverblue. Runtimes are special distros in a way, but since the official one are pretty building everything from source so the repos tend to be messy with buildscripts for everything.

https://zapps.app/ is another interesting thing in the space.

AppImage have some issues/restrictions like it cant run on older linux than one it was compiled on, so people compile it on the oldest pc's and a little bit of more quirks

AppImage are really good but zapps are good too, I had once tried to do something on top of zapp but shame that zapp went into the route of crypto ipfs or smth and then I don't really see any development of that now but it would be interesting if someone can add the features of zapp perhaps into appimage or pick up the project and build something similar perhaps.

This is really cool. Looks like it has a way for me to use my own dynamic linker and glibc version *.

At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into a zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages today).

* https://github.com/warptools/ldshim

> At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into a zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages today).

Looks like you met the right guy because I have built this tool :)

Allow me to show my project, Appseed (https://nanotimestamps.org/appseed): It's a simple fish script which I had (prototyped with Claude) some 8-10 months ago I guess to solve exactly this.

I have a youtube video in the website and the repository is open source on github too.

So this actually worked fantastic for a lot of different binaries that I tested it on and I had uploaded it on hackernews as well but nobody really responded, perhaps this might change it :p

Now what appseed does is that you can think of it is that it can take a binary and convert it into two folders (one is the dynamic library part) and the other is the binary itself

So you can then use something like tar to package it up and run it anywhere. I can of course create it into a single elf-64 as well but I wanted to make it more flexible so that we can have more dynamic library like or perhaps caching or just some other ideas and this made things simple for me too

Ldshim is really good idea too although I think I am unable to understand it for the time being but I will try to understand it I suppose. I would really appreciate it if you can tell me more about Ldshim! Perhaps take a look at Appseed too and I think that there might be some similarities except I tried to just create a fish script which can just convert any dynamic binary usually into a static one of sorts

I just want more people to take ideas like appseed or zapp's and run with it to make linux's ecosystem better man. Because I just prototyped it with LLM's to see if it was possible or not since I don't have much expertise in the area. So I can only imagine what can be possible if people who have expertise do something about it and this was why I shared it originally/created it I guess.

Let me know if you are interested in discussing anything about appseed. My memory's a little rusty about how it worked but I would love to talk about it if I can be of any help :p

Have a nice new year man! :p

Can you build GUI programs with this? I'm thinking anything that would depend on GPU drivers. Anything built with SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, whatever.

No, in my experimentation I tried to convert OBS into static and it had the issue of it's gui not working. I am not exactly sure what's the reason but maybe you can check out another library like sdl etc. that you mention, I haven't tested out SDL,OpenGL etc's support to be honest but I think that maybe it might not work in the current stage or not (not sure), there is definitely a possibility of making it possible tho because CLI applications work just fine (IO and everything) so I am not really sure what caused my obs studio error but perhaps you can try it and then let me know if you need any help/share the results!

Check Detour out: https://github.com/graphitemaster/detour?tab=readme-ov-file#...

I suspect with combination of Detour & Zapps it could be possible.

Interesting. I've had a hell of a time building AppImages for my apps that work on Fedora 43. I've found bug reports of people with similar challenges, but it's bizarre because I use plenty of AppImages on F43 that work fine. I wonder if this might be a clue

Appimage maybe, don’t say flatpak Cz wherever I update my arch system flatpak gets broken which I have to fix by updating or reinstalling