AM VS pkg2appimage

I recently discovered AM App Manager, it's app manager for appimages that have system integration and you can update all your apps with one command. Take a look at it's catalog to see if your app is supported.

I use https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM-Application-Manager to install App image, to include Neovim. By default it currently installs Version 10.0 and creates the symlinks.

I have been working on two CLI tools to install AppImage packages system wide and locall (they are AM and AppMan respectively). I've also written a website that acts as a catalog and a better source for downloading them all for real, https://portable-linux-apps.github.io !

In conclusion, I feel really confortable with docker/podman/distrobox/junest... but I also like a lot AppImage packages, so I'm trying to merge both. Something I learned all this time I use Linux is that there is no distro, no package format, no software... that can really satisfy my needs. The best hing I can do to solve this situation is to built it by myself (this is my main project, I named it "AM"). I spent two years to create what I like, after a decade as a common Linux user that uses what distro/package mantainers had to give, and this make me feel better. This last point is the main reason because all these distros and software solutions exists in GNU/Linux.

This is one of the 1700 installation scripts of my project.

I started writing AM/AppMan two years ago, it was just a custom script to install and always keep any Appimage package I needed updated to the latest version. Then become something much bigger.

Sure https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM-Application-Manager I have already tried with lowercases words but I don't like that, that's why I've chosen uppercased text. "De gustibus non est disputandum", Romans said.

I like containers, I've tried Junest and docker/podman/distrobox... also I work a lot with portable apps (see here) and I've also published a website for them (here) so I'm amazed on how you've built something that can merge them! I'll include it on my catalog (also I'm writing an installation script for it). Thank you!

Learn more at https://portable-linux-apps.github.io

The pkg2appimage script exists to do these conversions with many examples https://github.com/AppImageCommunity/pkg2appimage/tree/master/recipes

NOTE: I've built it using the recipe available at https://github.com/AppImageCommunity/pkg2appimage, added libunionpreload from https://github.com/project-portable/libunionpreload and some additional paths to LD_LIBRARy_PATH into the AppRun, just tested on Debian and Arch Linux... and works great!

Beyond all, my work is heavily focused on compiling AppImage from existing .deb packages through the use of pkg2appimage and appimagetool, as unofficial AppImage packages not present on AppImageHub are provided, but taken from fairly reliable sources ( Debian repositories, or in some cases a PPAs for Ubuntu). The sources are available via the -a or -w options of my scripts.

Does anyone actually do that? The official documentation says not to do that (see here). Also, the excludelist mentions a couple of problems that happen when certain libraries are bundled in an AppImage.

It sounds like there might also be at least some support for portable Linux formats on Mac: snap appears to allow installing on mac via brew, but it sounds like appimages and flatpaks cannot run on mac. that said, i haven't used snaps on mac nor have I ever heard of anyone who does so... so no clue if they work well there.

PS: yes, I know that better sources for this are already available, for example the Slackware repository and woolyss, but actually the more recent version, the 97, for old i386 machines is provided by Debian (ArchLinux32 has the v90, and other versions are quite buggy for this architecture, see this issue). Unluckily there is not a 32 bit version of pkg2appimage, if we had one or someone can fork better the main script, we can still have more appimages for old architectures, being many of my scripts for x86_64 wrote to support pkg2appimage (as you have already seen in my previous post).

If I have time enough, I wanna try to create a script that automatizes all the processes, also for you developers, but my knowledge is limited to the download of packages from Debian and derivatives or from Arch Linux to create these structures, I'm not much good in compiling these programs by myself into a chroot, I'm just an enthusiast.

Depends on who makes them, but generally everything besides this list

Brave doesn't officially provide any AppImages. There is a issue on GitHub tracking this, but it's definitely not their top priority right now. You can use pkg2appimage to produce an AppImage of Brave or use existing ones available on this GitHub repository. Keep in mind that these are unofficial sources that I don't recommend to use, but if you really want to, at your own risk.