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Packaging systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, and Snap allow Linux apps to have extensive backward compatibility going forward.



Maybe. I don't think the Linux world has made a credible commitment to support all or any of those going forward. In 5 years' time we can try to run 5 year old apps in those formats and see whether they work; I wouldn't bet on it myself.


Flatpak is confirmed to work on 28 Linux distros, and is pre-installed on 9 of them: https://www.flatpak.org/setup. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is committing to a 10 year support lifecycle for its Flatpak runtimes: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th...

AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years.

I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.


The fact that you're mentioning three different systems kind of proves the point - maybe one of them will still be working in 10 years on some distributions, but I wouldn't want to count on all of them working on the distributions that matter in 10 years' time. I'm old enough to remember LSB, which was notionally supported by all the big distros, but turned out to be useless in practice.


Yes. Flatpak is a game-changer.




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