[Sir_Substance]

I also prefer appimages as the "least worst" of the three.

However, a quick note: As someone who unofficially maintains a linux port of my companies software, I have considered packaging it as an appimage, but there's one problem with appimages that kills the concept.

Appimages are read-only[1]. I'd love to package my companies product that way, but we already have update-delivery infrastructure that works on windows and mac (and linux), and it assumes it can write to the "install folder". Changing the entire update infrastructure specifically for an OS we don't officially support is a non-starter.

From a developer perspective, I would love the ability to update an appimage's contents in place. However, as a user I'd also like the ability to set it read-only to block updates if I desire. Flatpak's mandatory updates are one of the key reasons I dislike it. Never the less, if the goal is to smooth the path for proprietary software to support linux without making half a dozen different packaging solutions, in place updates need to be supported.

[1] edit: according to comments below, they now have an update mechanism, but it's still a totally appimage-specific process, so my problem remains :/