I just found out about AppImageLauncher, a package handler for AppImages. It organizes them, creates desktop files for you and handles updates and removal.
Integrate AppImages to your application launcher with one click, and manage, update and remove them from there. Double-click AppImages to open them, without having to make them executable first.
Much better than having to create all the desktop files myself, and having to figure out what to put in them for it to work correctly (I’m looking at you, qBittorrent and magnet links).
Gear Lever is really cool as well: https://flathub.org/apps/it.mijorus.gearlever
Good looking out. I installed this and verified it’s working, but does this automatically start at start up? I can’t seem to get systemctl enable to work on it.
The best launcher you can get for AppImages is to just drop the thing and move to Flatpaks that don’t take 2 seconds to launch apps.
Some apps are only available as appimages.
Neverthrless you should ask the maintainer and work towards flatpaks.
As someone who tried to maintain a large application flatpak I would say it’s pain in the ass to work with and things break often. The way it’s configured and how permissions are set needs to be simplified.
Looking at you Bitwarden.
Appimage and snap. Why no flatpak?
There is a flatpak, but I’m pretty sure it’s a community version.
Appimage and snap. Why no flatpak?
I know why. They’re most likely running into this scenario as well.
From the “universal package formats” that’s the one I’ve had issues with when using it on a distro not specifically mentioned to work, it was supposed to be universal! Though not sure if that’s an issue with whoever packaged the app or anything specific with AppImage. Poor experience anyway.
Also no repo model. I like package manager to deal with shit. We have sorta solutions for that but not quite like snaps and flatpaks.
Also the dependencies stuff is weird. They advice you to think of the oldest (LTS?) distro you think the app will be used on and use deps compatible with that one. Which just seems, I dunno, icky, for lack of better word.
But for a random one-off app, I think it’s fine. I prefer flatpak but it’s fine, I wouldn’t avoid it or anything.
This app is great, I’ve used it for a few months. I used to hate dealing with appimages, now I don’t even think about them.
Nope, no thank you… I’m not touching anything other than native, AUR or Flatpak packages. AppImage has only been an inelegant and overall inferior alternative in my experience. The Windows experience, with Linux portability issues. “Find an installer online from some website, have it do whatever the hell it wants, polluting my home folder with random crap and hope it’s not a virus” with essentially zero advantages over Flatpak or even Snap.
What makes Flatpak so good? Honest question. It is a new package manager for me, I have mostly been on Linux server, not desktop. For all my use cases Flatpak has never been mentioned, I’ve always used apt-get until I installed Ubuntu as a desktop OS and it comes with Snap. The next thing I see is Flatpak > Snap and no mention of apt-get.
It’s not some miracle packaging system and while Flatpak-installed programs tend to start just as fast as native ones, I consider it inferior for most cases. Its two big advantages are that Flatpaks have a runtime they specify and depend on. It gets downloaded and installed automatically if missing when you install a Flatpak. So you’re much less likely to run into issues where a program won’t run on your system because of an incompatibility with a missing, or newer version of some library. Each Flatpak also gets installed in its own fake environment and is essentially a sandbox when you run the program. You can use a program named Flatseal to give each Flatpak access to specific directories or functionalities, or restrict it further. But the one big negative is that this runtime uses a lot of disk space. ~800MB per runtime.
It tends to work really well and I’ve been told that years ago a guy would use this packaging system to bundle pirated windows games with a preconfigured version of wine, which made them run out of the box, with zero tinkering. On top of essentially being sandboxed and unable to access your real home folder, internet, camera or microphone. Just to illustrate its versatility. It also kind of already won the war when Steam Decks started using Flatpak as their main packaging system.
It appears to be only desktop, what would explain why it is new to me despite being creating in 2007 (https://itsfoss.com/what-is-flatpak/, quick search).
Thanks for taking the time to explain. So from what I understand, it is a universal package manager (which apt-get is not) and it is FOSS (which I understand Snap is not)?
