pkg2appimage VS flatpak

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.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

No, it looks like you have to do it on an application basis.

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/2913

Flatpak

> CLI tools do not implement auto-complete themselves. What you are seeing are auto-complete scripts for your shell that make network connections.

nit: This is incorrect. Robust auto-complete scripts call the actual program to provide completions.

That is what Flatpak does. It is Flatpak itself that makes the network connections.

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/blob/main/completion/flat...

Not that it would make any differencen if it was implemented in Bash seeing as the Bash script is also provided by Flatpak.

The only performance impact I know of is with the seccomp filter in CPU-bound tasks: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4187

Skimming through the recent comments, there might be a way to optimize some of it.