Hi Kai, thanks for creating the Adonthell AppImage and for your feedback.
Your AppImage instantly runs on Ubuntu 16.04; didn’t test other distributions so far but am sure you have.
Looks like you are fully aware that wrapping it in a tarball is not the best thing to do in my opinion. Especially with large AppImages, it adds time to unpack, and complicates the handling. With some things that are forthcoming, such as an optional AppImage daemon for sandboxing and desktop integration, discoverability of upstream-provided AppImages in web app stores and in-distribution app centers, wrapping the AppImage inside an archive will be penalized even more.
What system do you compile this on? I recommend CentOS 6 or debian oldstable, so that the resulting binaries are most compatible with not just the most recent target systems.
I recommend bundling a private copy of Python in the AppImage. If you are that concerned about size you could profile which .py files are actually needed to run your particular app, but generally it’s probably not worth the hassle.
About bundling the manual, you could make it accessible from inside the app.
Yes, AppImage is all about simplicity.
Also have a look at the next generation which I have posted about here.