AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure

I've been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.

It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.

GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem

It's actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.

It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).

Meanwhile I'm typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.

Linux is not the best "apocalypse" OS, but it sure is better than Windows.