Forget everything anyone told you about Linux, think of each distro as its own OS.
Flatpak and Snap are the ones that work with everything and are the closest equivalents to .exe files. App images are kinda like the portable apps that were popular like 10-15years ago on windows. (Anyone remember using portable Firefox on a flashdrive?)
In addition to these each distro has its own kind of package format. (.DEB, .APK, .RPM, etc)
Just because 2 distros share a package format doesn’t mean they are compatible, in the same way a winxp .exe might not work on win11.
Idk if windows still has a 32bit version, or if it has an ARM version, but that’s what the .amd64 and .arm64 thing is for. Most people want .amd64.
Except for the .RPM package (which is presumably a Fedora package) all of these are clearly labeled by distro (Debian 10, Debian 11, Ubuntu, etc).
If you have a 64bit CPU and run Debian 11, you want:
debian-11-amd64.deb
but why run this over flatpak,snap,or appimage?
Disk space. System packages like this do not bundle the dependencies to run the application with it. Instead the dependencies are installed on the system a single time and shared between all applications.
Nowadays there is a push to migrate to using things like flatpak and snap but some old school Linux heads don’t really want to for either political reasons or just because it’s different than what they are used to.
Forget everything anyone told you about Linux, think of each distro as its own OS.
Flatpak and Snap are the ones that work with everything and are the closest equivalents to .exe files. App images are kinda like the portable apps that were popular like 10-15years ago on windows. (Anyone remember using portable Firefox on a flashdrive?)
In addition to these each distro has its own kind of package format. (.DEB, .APK, .RPM, etc)
Just because 2 distros share a package format doesn’t mean they are compatible, in the same way a winxp .exe might not work on win11.
Idk if windows still has a 32bit version, or if it has an ARM version, but that’s what the .amd64 and .arm64 thing is for. Most people want .amd64.
Except for the .RPM package (which is presumably a Fedora package) all of these are clearly labeled by distro (Debian 10, Debian 11, Ubuntu, etc).
If you have a 64bit CPU and run Debian 11, you want:
debian-11-amd64.deb
but why run this over flatpak,snap,or appimage?
Disk space. System packages like this do not bundle the dependencies to run the application with it. Instead the dependencies are installed on the system a single time and shared between all applications.
Nowadays there is a push to migrate to using things like flatpak and snap but some old school Linux heads don’t really want to for either political reasons or just because it’s different than what they are used to.