Appimages totally suck, because many developers think they were a real packaging format and support them exclusively.
Their use case is tiny, and in 99% of cases Flatpak is just better.
I could not find a single post or article about all the problems they have, so I wrote this.
This is not about shaming open source contributors. But Appimages are obviously broken, pretty badly maintained, while organizations/companies like Balena, Nextcloud etc. don’t seem to get that.
Flatpaks will always be a little slower, notably if you are on slow storage media.
Yes this is all native messaging I suppose. Flatpak apps can query an app list, just look at flatseal. So I think querying the installed flatpaks and handing it over to the system portal where you then choose the desired app is the modern workflow for this.
You might want to request that Digikam etc. implement portals for this file opening. Firefox can do for example but of course these are limited as long as apps dont modernize their workflow
I do hope flatpak can solve these things. I have the deb installs all working harmoniously at the moment, so I don’t want to touch them but will have another look at flatpak versions at some point in the future.
Downstream Distribution is simply very very work intensive. By having the system and apps come from a downstream origin, packagers need to follow upstream and keep up with versions. And as upstream doesnt officially support these packages, many will have bugs. Or like on Debian, packages will be unusable as they are too old with unfixed bugs for years.
Neither Android, nor Windows nor any other big OS do things that way, for a reason.