Linux software distribution has no consensus solution, and Noam Lewis, author of the Fresh TUI editor, just documented every reason why. The post walks through the full landscape: distro-specific package managers, NPM, Homebrew, Rust crates, the Arch AUR, stray APT repositories, AppImage, and Flatpak. Lewis built packages for all of them. The findings are blunt: Flatpak is a poor fit for terminal applications, AppImage is slow because it mounts a filesystem image on launch, and distro-specific formats require duplicating the same work repeatedly with no guarantee of acceptance into a distribution channel.
The solution Lewis landed on is a statically linked binary using the musl libc runtime, bundled with an integrated updater. Windows developers will recognize this immediately. It sidesteps the entire packaging ecosystem by shipping a self-contained artifact that runs without dependency resolution. It is not ideologically pure by Linux standards, but it works.
The full post is worth reading for the per-format breakdown, which doubles as a decision matrix for any developer shipping a Linux app today. The deeper question it raises: why does the platform that powers most of the world's servers still have no standard answer for distributing a desktop binary in 2025.
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