None. I prefer native packages. AUR usually has me covered and hasn’t broken my system…ever, really. Yet, anyways. (Well, it might have broken my Manjaro install, but it is Manjaro, so i probably sneezed wrong)

…but, if I had to pick one? Flatpaks. Outta the three, they’ve given me the least trouble and just work right out the gate. Still prefer native packages tho

As far as I know, Flatpaks have the best foundation currently, there are a number of issues, but they are fixable and not entirely by design. And with Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite and OpenSUSE MicroOS you can really see how native debs/rpms/whatever isn’t really that good of an idea for the average user and Flatpak is a solution to that.

Appimages at a glance seems like a perfect solution for apps that for some reason or another needs to be kept outdated. But there is (was?) an issue of it not really bundling everything it needs, it looks and behaves as it is portable, but as far as I’m aware, it really isn’t.

And then there’s Snap. Yeah, that one is just weird, it honestly just doesn’t feel like a proper solution to any of the problems it tries to fix.

Flatpak is my preference since it supports multiple remotes (repos) and sandboxing. With flatseal tweaking the sandbox is also easy.

Snaps work great on Ubuntu and support cli tools as well as system components. But their sandboxing doesn’t work on many distros and the one and only repo is controlled by one company. If I’m not on Ubuntu, I don’t see any reason to choose it over flatpak.

Appimages are great for putting on a USB stick or keeping a specific version of software. But I want to install software from a trusted repository, which Appimages support at best as an afterthought.

Flatpak – It’s not without it’s own issues, of course, but it does the job. I’m not fan of how snaps are designed, and I don’t think canonical is trustworthy enough to run a packaging format. Appimages are really just not good for widespread adoption. They do what they are designed to do well, but I don’t think it’s wide to use them as a main package format.

Snaps is too well controlled by Canonical and does have it’s limits.

Flatpaks can be very secure, and works in most distros. It is one of my favorites.

AppImages are real easy, and is designed to work on most distros. The only problem is that many apps aren’t current. So I don’t recommend it unless an app provides it on their own sites. AppImages are often made by somebody else.