AppImageUpdate VS pkg2appimage

There's an updater for appimages https://github.com/AppImageCommunity/AppImageUpdate

AppImages can contain update information (and even support partial updates using zsync), check out https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate.

https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate this only works if the application has information regarding where to fetch the update from...

It would be very nice and handy if we could easily update Tutanota Linux desktop app. Luckily, since it is packaged as an AppImage, there's an easy-to-integrate utility available just for that.

It's not centralised, not like Snap with SnapCraft, not even like Flatpak with it's 'not technically but kinda is in practice' Flathub repository. Anyone can make an AppImage, anyone can host an AppImage, anyone can download and run an AppImage, anyone can implement AppImage integration in a distro, and there's even a nice system for automatic updates for AppImage which again is nicely decentralised.

Some have built-in. some not. Btw I considered AppImageUpdate , but it would become re-install a full new app

The fact is that the delta update system via Zsync and appimageupdatetool are real solutions to the problem, but too many developers do not implement it in their AppImage, myself included.

Btw, regarding Flatpak, I've had multiple issues related to mouse cursor, fonts, and local folder access - all related to the sandboxing of apps, all resolvable, but potentially a problem for a non-technical user. I've had much better experiences with AppImages, but I don't know if they have a graphical app store like interface; even the AppImageUpdate idea is still catching on.

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.