When run, AppImages extract to /tmp/, all the files, every single time.
Since flash memory has limited write cycles, does it mean using appimages wears out SSDs and thumbrives more than normally installed apps where files are just read and not written?
A couple things about this:
For one, AppImages don’t actually extract (by default), they use something called FUSE to create a virtual directory. When you access a file in this directory, the FUSE driver runs some code to uncompress the file and access its contents real-time. This means there is a slight performance hit to accessing resources in AppImages compared to uncompressed applications, but in practice it’s rarely even observable.
Secondly, /tmp nowadays is no longer actually on your HDD/SSD on a large majority of Linux distros. It is almost always a “tmpfs”, which is entirely in RAM, so writing to it isn’t going to eat write cycles on your SSD anyway.
Exactly. The contents get extracted into RAM rather than being extracted to disk.