So I’ve had issues with AppImage (and Snapcraft, and Flatpak, and whatever new flavor of the month versions exist) for a while. The arguments in favor are always the same, as are the rebuttals, and so on and so forth.

Snapcraft User: It makes life simpler!
Gray Beard: You end up with duplicate copies of libraries though.
SU: Who cares, disk is cheap!
GB: I still have to deploy to a server or whatever. And what about deploying security fixes if the bundled libraries are out of date?
SU: The important libraries like libc live outside the application, so your package manager deals with those. Besides, it’s not like code reuse is a thing anymore! Every application already uses a different {image,audio,windowing} library.

So I decided it was time to investigate for myself. I grabbed the AppImage of KDevelop because:

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