When comparing yay vs AppImage, the Slant community recommends yay for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux package managers?” yay is ranked 8th while AppImage is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose yay is:
It's written in Go so it is fairly easy to add features or tweak this amazing tool.
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Pros
Pro Easy to add features
It's written in Go so it is fairly easy to add features or tweak this amazing tool.
Pro Intuitive CLI
Yay's commands and output make sense for anyone used to the pacman package manager.
Pro Written in Go
The compiled program is snappy while the source is easy to read.
Pro Available as a precompiled binary
Both yay and yay-bin are in the AUR, the latter of which doesn't require any dependencies or compilation, making installation and updates quick and painless.
Pro Yogurt interactive mode
Write package name without keys [yay <packagename>] to enter interactive mode.
Pro Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen
Pro No integration into the system
Leaves your system untouched.
Pro Easy to use
Just execute the package to run the software.
Pro Easy deployment of software
It just works across different distros.
Cons
Con Written in Go
Running a Go program requires the Go runtime. Go is also a garbage collected language, so the program isn't as responsive as it could be.
Con No wayland support
Apps look pretty bad on 4k monitors.
Con No automatic updates
You have to re-download the application to update it.
Con Big file size
