Welcome disruption
AppImage has some deep flaws. It maintains a hardcoded list of libraries which are not included in the AppImage. The result is very often a crashing application, because the host does not provide the library or the host version does not match the linked version. AppImages also crash if FUSE is not available. You can tell AppImage to self-extract and avoid FUSE, but it requires an environment variable. Why not just fall back to self extraction instead of crashing? Goddammit.
Flatpak fares far better. Looking at the LingLong docs, it looks very similar to Flatpak API. Maybe it creates the needed competition for Red Hat to polish Flatpaks rough edges.
Snap meanwhile ... is just a half-arsed Flatpak competitor and ought to be scrapped. Snap out of it, Ubuntu!
The article briefly mentions Flatpaks focus on desktop. Would be interesting to see LingLong on the server. It seems to rely on Linux containers for its sandbox, so could certainly tackle Docker (if LL would export OCI container like Flatpak does LL would even be compatible with Docker). I'd also welcome an effort to replace Kubernetes with a revised, less complex component, based on LL capabilities.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
