pkg2appimage VS AppImageLauncher

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.

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!