Disclaimer
Flatpak uses OSTree, like Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite etc) and similar to BTRFS snapshots.
So many files are deduplicated and linked, not actually there
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
There was an app that dealt with desktop entry and auto-update but it hasn’t bee updated since a few years already.
Can be remedied with an official store/ being distrubuted by the devs themselves instead of random people. Appimage isn’t getting a tenth of the support flatpak is getting.
Might worth it if you have dozens of very heavy apps but it’s totally not the case if you only need a few simple programs.
Yes, Appimages lost the race. The apps are old afaik, and often dont work. It sucks when distributors use Appimages as they are simply a bad app format.
There is a way to convert Appimages to Flatpaks, but I havent got that complete.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Appimage-To-Flatpak