[tde-users] Re: Appimage

Greets, everybody . . . I've got a book coming on, and one of the rituals attendant to that is searching for an outliner/organizational application into which I can dump notes and such by chapter and conduct some of the other housekeeping involved. So I've gone through the bespoke applications that supposedly perform these functions and have learned that as with the last book a couple of years ago they all suck. I don't think that anyone involved with any of them has ever written anything for publication -- they've certainly not written anything resembling instructions for use of their applications. One of these applications, a thing called "Joplin," is an appimage. I'd encountered one of these before; Geeqie releases some versions in that form, which I tried. I like Geeqie, but I don't much like appimages, though I'm not sure I can tell you why. So I thought I'd ask here what people think of appimages, both the idea of them and the way they're made and used in practice, in case there's a difference. My vague distaste for them runs counter to reservations I had when moving to Linux from OS/2 and similar DOS-centric operating systems. My complaint then was that with DOS, Windows (at the time a DOS desktop) and OS/2 put a particular application's files all in one directory, Word in \word, Lotus in \lotus, and so on, so banishing an application involved nuking a directory and that was that. (I still think that more things ought to be in their own directories under /opt, and am glad that TDE does this; that prejudice came about when we were building KDE from source a time or two a week and having the whole thing blow up was not unheard of; deleting the failed build and renaming the existing, working version reduced the risk.) Sorry for the digression. Having not given appimages a lot of thought but seeing that they're becoming more common, just thought I'd ask if there are any strong reasons for or against them. Are appimages a good idea for anything beyond test-drive purposes? -- dep