Please package Mailspring into an AppImage. Here’s a basic video showcasing how easy it might be to accomplish this:
Once you understand how to do this manually, I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to automate this process to where each time you do a build, the creation of the AppImage just happens, and you could probably even automate the step of publishing it to your website as a download.
So it would be a little work at first, but once you get it into your build, it will be on autopilot thereafter.
I realize you’ve already tried to be accommodating by packaging Mailspring as a snap. Also, I see other posts where people are requesting you package it as a Flatpak.
I’ve been studying all three of these technologies the last few weeks and I like AppImages the best. Number one, for security, I like that firejail works with AppImages, but it doesn’t with snaps or flatpaks. This gives me more peace of mind when I’m trying out new applications. Also, the portability of AppImages was a deciding factor for me. I think it is pretty neat that I can run an AppImage from a thumb-drive that I can plug into any major Linux distribution: Just double-click the file and the application launches. No bull: it doesn’t mount a bunch of garbage onto my filesystem; it doesn’t require a special package manager service running like the other ones do. However, there are tools like that for AppImages if you want them. If you don’t want them, the AppImage still works. So, that flexibility was another deciding factor for me.
AppImages are single-file applications that run on most Linux distributions. Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered. Most AppImages run on recent versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other common desktop distributions.