config VS AppImageLauncher

For reference, I use Nix a lot. I was pushing it pretty hard at Intuit while I worked there.

All my systems are managed with it:

https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

And I have created projects like Snowfall Lib to make working with certain features easier:

https://github.com/snowfallorg/lib

Declarative home environments are pretty great. Being able to reproduce your entire user setup is fantastic when you manage multiple machines or want to make future migrations.

I run NixOS and use Home-Manager as well. This lets me define my entire system in addition to my user home contents declaratively. So with this configuration I can apply NixOS & Home-Manager to get the same results anywhere.

Here is an example of my Home-Manager configuration: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/a3da20eeab74a50a...

In this example I configure Git. This gets written to my user home's config directory.

I started by packaging Homer itself: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/main/packages/homer/default.nix

Here's my hardware config (ignore the comment, I need to remove that now): https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/dev/systems/x86_64-linux/jasper/hardware.nix

Here's an example of an appimage I've packaged if it helps: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/c8476566abf46450060131be23a15910cb530208/packages/ubports-installer/default.nix

I jumped in several months ago and haven't really regretted it. The caveat being that you have to be okay with learning Nix (the language), debugging with only arcane error messages to go off of, and reading a lot of the config source because documentation is vast but shallow. If you feel like you're willing to make the tradeoff, then it is a blast and you'll be surprised you ever lived without Nix.

In case you want some inspiration or to take an existing config and run, feel free to take a peek at or use mine: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

Every file that you want to execute has to be in your environment PATH. I would also advise to put symlinks and personal executables in ~/.local/bin and put that to your path. Since your user has ownership over that directory, you won't have any probs with permissions that may or may not occur at all. Since we're talking about AppImage files, you might also want to take a look at AppImageLauncher which does a pretty good job at creating entries for your Desktop Menu for the AppImage files that you install to your system.

I think it's safe to install it directly as it stores everything in a single directory. For AppImages there is also AppImagePool + AppImageLauncher (can be installed rootless, useful for better integration of appimages).

This reminds me of a prettier version of AppImageLauncher. Is there also an "Uninstall" option in the right-click menu of the app launcher?

I'm using AppImageLauncher on Fedora.

"... I recall that this was related to an issue with most Electron apps, wherein the AppImage cannot be integrated with the desktop or the favourites bar. So far we've found that the AppImageLauncher (https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher) helps with getting around this!