I’ve used one or two tools that only distribute for my system as an appimage or as source code.

I can’t always be bothered to set up a compilation environment or deal with removing dependencies.

I only use one or two regularly, but it’s nice to have them integrated!

I prefer from the distro’s repos, then source, then flatpack, then appimage. Sometimes you have to take what you can get!

There’s an appimaged daemon you can install that will manage them, and it watches a bunch of folders to integrate appimages with xdg and whatever window manager you’ve got. ~/Applications looks like an easy pick, or ~/.local/bin.

Appimages you decide to keep you can just move there!