Roni Laukkarinen
@rolle@mementomori.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

AppImage is a frustrating invention for Linux. It should work like macOS's .app, but it falls short. Getting an app to run and dock always involves tinkering and manually deploying a .desktop item, among other hassles.

I wish I had known about Gear Lever for Gnome earlier. omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/07/gear-l

Gear Lever makes updating AppImage apps much easier. I prefer .deb packages, but too many apps don't offer them.

Source code: github.com/mijorus/gearlever
aulis
@aulis@mementomori.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
Nazo
@nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@rolle Ah. Flatpak isn't really truly isolated though. Its default true sandboxing is limited mostly to its own base. That provides very limited isolation which has its downsides security/etc-wise, but has the advantage that it has pretty direct access to the system. That's one of the things I do like about Flatpak since, as you say, complete isolation can be a pain to deal with. (That's one reason I don't want full VM stuff.)

If you have something that is configured to be almost completely isolated so it's doing weird mounts to get to locations, all you have to do is run Flatseal or the command line and grant it direct access to the folders you want it to use (or even system if you don't care about the security -- though a few like Steam may refuse to run with full system access.)
scops
@scops@social.tchncs.de  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@rolle the #OpenPandora has it's own image format like #AppImage called PND. For the successor there is DBP... nevertheless PND works like a charm; download an image to one of the default application folders and it gets automatically integrated in the menu, to the desktop... I wish someone would adopt this workflow to other platforms.

Some stuff to read about PND and how it works: https://pandorawiki.org/Introduction_to_PNDs
David Fleetwood - RG Admin
@reflex@retrogaming.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago
@rolle I've used Gear Lever for a while, but unfortunately the lead of the Appimage project refuses to update for Fusev3 so eventually support for the format will end in most distros as Fusev2 is considered unmaintained and a potential security vuln. I know Fedora has been discussing dropping it.

That said, Flatpaks are nice these days and my preferred format. I avoid .rpm/deb/etc as installing apps with root permissions is poor security.