arch2appimage VS junest

Arch2AppImage is useless, just like my Arch-Deployer (Arch2AppImage is inspired by my project, see it's README), I've also created an "issue" on its repository to explain why I've abandoned it, see https://github.com/hanzala123/arch2appimage/issues/25 ).

I'm a creator of AppImage packages, the basis always used (and recommended) is to create them based on old distributions for compatibility reasons. With this solution I want to try to break that rule. Both my Arch-deployer and the better known arch2appimage failed at this (and were archived as a result).

less than two years ago I published a bash script that can that downloads a package from the Arch repository or from ChaoticAUR with all its dependences, and this was a big success for me on this community and on github. Later someone else, inspired by this project, have developed its own tool with a better code and easier to use (DT on YouTube did also a review on it, here). Everithing is great, I'm glad about all this, but... I stopped work on my repo more than 1 year ago (about december 2021) for a reason, the same that I think the developer of arch2appimage have understand later (and I said it into an issue, here), that's why its project have no more commits since 9 months. Arch-based AppImages are not a good idea, here are two reasons:

If you are in Arch, arch2appimage can easily make packages from Chaotic AUR.

Explore the Junest Git project and follow the installation instructions. Activate the environment with junest setup and enable the running-from-host options.

PS: about JuNest (see https://github.com/fsquillace/junest ) this is a lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs, without root privileges, on top of any other Linux distro. I also suggest to take a look at it.

About JuNest, all the apps installed using it whave always worked well for me. I've also wrote a script and done a pull request (rejected) for a tool that exports the apps to the launcher (as distrobox-export already do) https://github.com/fsquillace/junest/pull/322

JuNest https://github.com/fsquillace/junest looks very complete and good, though I dislike the approach of having to download or build an image. It would be nice to be able to do stuff like clone my filesystem (already ZFS) and branch an environment off that instantly.

I have already done a PR (see here)to the main repository https://github.com/fsquillace/junest but I still get errors in merging this utility during the automatic github-action's test/check. Any idea?

- I have pacman installed through junest. It works for command line programs, did not test for gui software

Have you tried installing JuNest? It will allow you to download, install, and use Arch's precompiled binaries directly (in addition to making it easy to compile, install, and use AUR packages).

As for the rest, I've been testing stuff with distrobox, junest (which is like distrobox, but for arch guest and without the container), and Conty (a lot like Junest but as a single hyper-compressed executable file). Anything requiring an escalation or wanting actual access to root remains an issue, but for the most part, it works well enough.