Why I Shipped a Linux Desktop App as an AppImage (and Skipped Snap/Flatpak)

Linux packaging is where good desktop apps go to die. If you’ve shipped a Linux desktop application, you already know the pain: you can build something solid, fast, and stable… and then lose days (or weeks) fighting packaging quirks across distros, runtimes, sandboxes, portals, GLIBC mismatches, and “works on my machine” dependency landmines. I’m building OpenChat for Linux, a lightweight ChatGPT desktop client built with Tauri (Rust). Early on, I decided to focus on one distribution format that would actually let Linux users install it easily without creating a maintenance nightmare for me: AppImage. This post is the reasoning behind that decision, what went wrong with other formats, and what I learned. The goal: one build that works across distros When you’re distributing a desktop app to Linux users, you’re really targeting: different distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.) different package managers different libc/runtime realities different desktop environments and portal behaviors d