Appimage

I have been almost exclusively using Ubuntu and its derivatives as long as I remember ¹

Benefit of using such mainstream distro was that for the most part, all the software was available in deb format.

But recently things are changing.

More and more software is being made available via snaps, flatpak or appimages

Much can be said about pros and cons of each of these. But that is not the point of this post. 😄

Why is AppImage getting popular ? Read this

TL;DR :

• Self-contained binaries.
• Avoids dependecy conflicts
• Can get latest version of the software directly from the author. No need to wait for your distro’s packages to get the updates (which may take really long or never)

Few downsides of Appimages:

• Need to manually add execute permission (as simple as chmod a+x myapp.appimage, still ..)
• No auto-updates
  • Although some apps provide build this functionality in the app. How ? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
• No Desktop entry. Need to start the app from the terminal

There are a few solutions for this.

• appimaged
• AppImageLauncher

I tried both, and settled on AppImageLaucher.

appimaged monitors certain fixed set of folders. ~/Downloads being one of them. Which is a good thing. Most of your software first lands up in that folder. But then for the same reason, I keep deleting stuff from it, so keep it clean. appimaged does not let you configure “folders to watch” ²

AppImageLauncher comes with proper GUI to configure the “destination” for appimages.

When one starts a new appimage, AppimageLauncher moves it to designated folder (configured earlier by you)

It also supports updates (per documentation, but I have not tested it yet) ³

Both of them create a Desktop Entry, so that the app can be launched from the menu. Although AppImageLauncher created an entry with Version number 🆒

Now that I have AppImageLauncher, I am more likely to use appimage based software. Especially when deb file is outdated.