Installation options
How you choose to install will make a difference when you want to upgrade.
The manner in how your software integrates with your system depends on your package manager. Yet in the case of applications such as your whiteboard software you may want it packaged differently. Most of the programs in this
Roundup are cross-platform, which gives you the opportunity to run your favourite on all platforms. For this reason, you may appreciate Appimage, Flatpak or even a binary based on something else. You have options for all of this, though it shouldn’t be the main reason for choosing a particular application.
In an ordinary installation of Linux, there’s support for the three main packaging systems. Choosing any of these packages will be enough to install. Only Lorien doesn’t come with any of the known packages. Instead they’ve created a binary containing the Godot3 engine – no other installation needed. The three best applications in this regard are Xournal++, OpenBoard and Rainbow Board as they come as all three. Support for other OSes are also well supported in this group, making it easier to use on several devices.
Rnote’s developers have decided to focus on just a Flatpak version. If you don’t want to support Flatpak, you have the source code of course, which is the case for all the packages. From a developer’s perspective, choosing a single package is a good thing because it frees up time to develop features and correct bugs. If users want another package format, there needs to be someone who can contribute some time to set it up and then test it. Being free and open source, you can always compile it yourself.
If you want to install from source, you have a few choices to make again, because different languages are involved. Xournal++ and OpenBoard are C++ and so are compiled using the gcc. Rnote uses Rust, which makes compiling quite similar. Rainbow Board is written in JavaScript and is an Electron application. The interesting outlier here is Lorien that requires Godot3 to compile. Once you have that, you can compile for all the OSes.
None of the packages have huge dependencies to worry about, so your system can stay slim when using them. Lorien only needs Godot3 installed if you want to compile it.