dotfiles VS AppImageKit

I'm in the middle of switching now, from Silverblue. It's a lot of fun. The Arch wiki to do something will have you changing three files and restarting 2 services, while with NixOS you add a line to your config and you're done. And when something doesn't exist as a Nix package/config, it seems somewhat easy to build your self (compared to other package managers, at least). I realized there's no "game-devices" package last night, for example, but I was able to get this working in about an hour of Googling:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/nix/nix/gamedevices....

Still not all the way in. Like, I'm still going to use Chezmoi for my home directory because I don't quite see the value-add of Home Manager, but who knows; maybe I'll be a super fan next year and move everything over.

Fonts were always a PITA for me too, until I realized you can just drop whatever you want in ~.local/share/fonts. Then you can even track them with whatever dotfile manager you use and always have them available on every machine you use, immutable or not. There's zero need to involve a package manager.

I just have a wrapper script that I run instead of sway itself.

That doesn't fly with me. I just use Alacritty and re-bind the keys so I can still use ctrl-c and v:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacr...

What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since i prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros.

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years.

[0] https://appimage.org/

I found a similar issue on github and tried this solution but still getting the same error .

There is AppImage[1], which packs a lot of stuff into a SquashFS filesystem, appends it to the executable, so everything is in one file.

[1] https://appimage.org

Nah i think yall just hating appimage. Real gold standard.

Although I haven't used plugins feature myself yet, this does sound like the perfect use case for them. Not every patient needs to access every single source. With plugins you can load only the source (or few sources) that they actually need. You can still use something like https://appimage.org/ to give them "a single binary", but will actually contain your slim binary and all the plugins.

```dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2 AppImages require FUSE to run. You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage if you run it with the --appimage-extract option. See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE for more information```

This doesn't look like a squashfs image. Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup. You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage  if you run it with the --appimage-extract option.  See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE  for more information open dir error: No such file or directory

appimages. Appimages are similar to flatpaks, exept that they are a file you download and double click to run. Think of them as portable softwares like windows has (portable apps). They are sandboxed too. You can learn more about appimages here