Making AppImage the priority number 1 for Linux

[Acero]

Hi,

As 0AD has a notoriously big linux-based playerbase percentage compared to other games, its a shame that the linux distribution options after a new alpha have always felt a bit chaotic and kind of a hit or miss.

If you go to https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GettingTheUnixRelease you can see a long list of instalation options for several different linux flavors, but many of them are not available right after a new release. Moreover if you are using a linux distribution that is not the latest (but still active and not end-of-life) you might be stuck with an old version of 0AD for years until you reinstall or upgrade to a newer version of your operating system.

Only at the end of that long list you can see two distributions formats that are compatible with most linux distributions (Flatpak and AppImage), but none of them are managed by wildfiregames and it is not clear if they have the latest release available just yet (the word 'rc1' is present in the appimage at least). Also sending non technical users to dive into Github to install their game is not good imo.

This is problematic for current players, but even more so for new players, which will install 0AD from their repositories and find an almost empty lobby of a previous alpha with 2 or 3 players maximum. It happened to me years ago. This is terrible marketing for a game.

Instead of forcing the 0AD devs to navigate the complexity of every mayor linux distribution system in order to release a new alpha of the game, why not just choose to make it available as a single AppImage file, which should downloadable as the first option here: https://play0ad.com/download/linux/

In my own experience as a perpetual noob linux user, AppImage is the format that has given me the least amount of friction to install software when the version i am looking for is not available in my distribution repostory. What can be easier than downloading a file, making it executable, and double clicking it. Its even simpler than Flatpack as it does not requires any previous package managment system.

This is the marketting for AppImage:

Linux apps that run anywhere.

Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

"As a user, I want to download an application from the original author, and run it on my Linux desktop system just like I would do with a Windows or Mac application."

"As an application author, I want to provide packages for Linux desktop systems, without the need to get it 'into' a distribution and without having to build for gazillions of different distributions."

I think 0AD is the ideal candidate for using AppImage as:

1. The 0AD version/alpha changes very infrequently so we don't need constant  upgrades every week like firefox for example.
2. While it is true that AppImages are bulkier than a distribution version beacuse all dependencies have to be bundled in the file, this is not a problem because the few hunderds of megabytes 0AD uses is tiny compared to the the disk usage of modern games.
3. It is a relatively obscure program installed by relatively few people, so distributions dont care a lot about having the latest version available.

After you release the official AppImage you could spend your time (if available) making sure most repositories of most distributions support your new alpha, but that should come after an official cross platform universal executable for linux has been released.

If you want to reply that linux users should get used to compiling their stuff, and/or learn to navigate dependency hell, i can only say:

"Think about the noobs!!!"

Edited January 30 by Acero

[myliverhatesme]

I have a solution that might work for you: