said Thierry de Coulon: | On Monday 25 October 2021 17.07:27 dep wrote: | > Greets, everybody . . . | > | > 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. | | I can't say that I "like" appimages, but they do solve some dependancy | hell problems. | | At my school, we used a software named "Uniboard" (electronic | whiteboard). It was then dropped by the university of Lausanne that made | it, taken over by French (renamed something I've forgotten), dropped | again, forked by the University of of Geveva (Switzerland) and renamed | OpenBoard. | | They provide Ubuntu packages that don't run on Debian (I'm not sure how | they run on Ubuntu). I found however an Appimage and that one does run, | because the appimages contain all thr dependancies. That may take more | place but I don't have to try and pollute my machine with packages that, | in the end, don't help (when they still exist for Debian). | | So I find the idea (rather like a Mac app) quite good. | | It does require installing stuff I use rarely, and I have not | investigated exactly what the appimage package consists of. I've trusted | Debian... That all makes sense. The one complaint I've had is that they don't well document things such as where they put configuration files and the like, which is annoying -- I often try out a program, learn that it isn't what I need, and delete it. Then months or years later I find some orphan configuration file and have no idea what it is for and whether I can be safely rid of it. During my extremely brief test of "Joplin," I sought to learn how to uninstall it. After a little online searching I found the answer, but it came along with an angry comment from the developer. That's one overarching benefit with .deb files (and maybe .rpm by now -- I haven't used RPMs much this millennium): it's possible to utterly delete an application fairly painlessly. If the menu police would like to do something that's actually useful, they could formulate a standard that specifies that every application include uninstall/purge instructions. Then enforce it as vigorously as they do the weird menu standard. | Some KDE programs like kdenlive exist as appimages. I don't know how far | they would prevent parts of KDE to need being installed though. That was a question I had. There have been various ways to run what amount to non-native programs by including the dependencies but, yes, how far does it go? Might one, for instance, put together an appimage to run a now-deprecated i386 program? Or a DOS app? Where does the appimage become a virtual machine? (I'm sure there's a formal answer to the last question, but I do not know what it is.) To be (sort-of) on topic, in pursuit of my writing helper application it occurred to me that there might be a way to accomplish this with Basket Note Pads, on which I rely for other things and which I think is one of the best KDE/TDE applications ever, similar to the wonderful InfoSelect TSR that was around before most people on this list were born. From time to time I've made use of TDE and mainline KDE versions of the same application alongside each other -- I have both KDE and Trinity versions of DigiKam and GwenView installed and working here now, for instance -- but just now I tried to install the current KDE version of Basket (for KDE4) and while it seemed to install uneventfully, if there's a way to run it I can't find it. Making me wonder if there's an easy way to cook up an appimage for such cases one might need one. | Another such idea is snap. I've had less success with snaps. Are snaps much the same idea as appimages? There have been a lot of strange packaging systems -- snap and something called flatpak among them -- about which I know almost nothing, figuring that I'd wait to see if they become popular enough that they're likely to stick around. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/

On Monday 25 October 2021 18.36:05 dep wrote: I happen to have a test install of Devuan Chimaera, as far as I remember without any special installs appart from TDE (I installed the last Beta, then upgraded to stable when it came out). I have simply downloaded the kdenlve appimage, made it executable, started it: seems to work as intended. So it seems yes, this could be a way to run KDE apps, maybe also Gnome ones, without installing the backbone of these UIs. Snaps seem to have the advantage of being sandboxed, however installing, manipulating and deleting them is more complicated. There is also Flatpack out there. However, my basic needs are usually covered by the standard repositories, and for rare, special needs I find the simplicity of appimages good. As to security, well, anyone heard of a security breach through appimages? I've got recent backups of my system and little on my harddisc that could be of any use to cyber-burglers. Oh, and being alive is a permanent risk, so... Thierry -- Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.