Size of the user base

[swiley]

It's not quite as as bad as all that. For a person using a home computer for general web browsing, youtube videos, and email, Linux works just fine. I've set up several that way.

That is true, I do the same. Its a pretty low bar though, since "the web" is the platform in this picture.

Flatpak and snap give some flexibility in packaging applications for differing Linux distributions.

Anecdotally, I've tried running an AppImage on Guix SD and the package did not work, failing with a missing shared library. Flatpack and snap seem to require installing something on the user's machine, perhaps some sort of runtime, before use. I'm still hopeful that one of these solutions has the magic sauce to make it all come together though.

AppImage is dynamically linked to the libc runtime which IIRC is in a different place on Guix and so it won't start.