The distro packages are not distro-agnostic. But a linux release tarball is distro-agnostic, although some system settings can affect it.
We’ve been doing release tarballs for literally decades now and there’s nothing wrong with them, but package managers help with updates, GUI, and dependency management. AppImage in particular supports PGP signatures and differential upgrades, which is pretty cool. Flatpak has interesting approach about “portals” for sandboxing, although it’s far from user-friendly or secure so far. Snap has really nothing going on for it and there’s absolutely 0 reason to use it. [0]
[0] Yes there’s one reason, as always, it’s pushed by a big corp. So leap.se project for example packages bitmask only for snap because that’s where their userbase is. Such a shame.
The distro packages are not distro-agnostic. But a linux release tarball is distro-agnostic, although some system settings can affect it.
We’ve been doing release tarballs for literally decades now and there’s nothing wrong with them, but package managers help with updates, GUI, and dependency management. AppImage in particular supports PGP signatures and differential upgrades, which is pretty cool. Flatpak has interesting approach about “portals” for sandboxing, although it’s far from user-friendly or secure so far. Snap has really nothing going on for it and there’s absolutely 0 reason to use it. [0]
[0] Yes there’s one reason, as always, it’s pushed by a big corp. So leap.se project for example packages bitmask only for snap because that’s where their userbase is. Such a shame.