4 ms·

On other platforms people don't even try to support anything but one "distro". You could make an AppImage or snap that would work across pretty much any mainst

On other platforms people don't even try to support anything but one "distro". You could make an AppImage or snap that would work across pretty much any mainstream non-hobbist-oriented distro, and Snap/AppImages is pretty much the Linux equivalent of EXE. Raspberry Pi OS just moved to NetworkManager and they have PipeWire, which was the last reason I had to deal with less common software stacks, so it seems like stuff is getting more standardized.

night-rider 3y ago
+1 AppImages. And the beauty is you can make them portable by creating a folder with the same name as the AppImage and append .home to the end, and boom: portable software. For example image-editor.AppImage image-editor.AppImage.home (folder, all settings are stored there)
- zer0zzz 3y ago
  Actually, I don't think I've tried AppImage. Does it do static linking or does it do something more similar to flatpak?
  - account42 3y ago
    It's a self-mounting image so closer to flatpak than static linking but without the strict isolation.
account42 3y ago
Snaps will not work on anything but Ubuntu. AppImages are just a fancy self-mounting disk image. If you do it right and include all required contents then it will work ~anywhere but you can just as well do that in a .tar.{gz,xz,zstd}/whatever archive.
- hollerith 3y ago
  >Snaps will not work on anything but Ubuntu. I installed VSCode as a snap on my Fedora install and it worked fine as far as I could tell. This was in Mar 2021, and I chose the snap because code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux said that "Due to the manual signing process and the system we use to publish, the yum repo may lag behind and not get the latest version of VS Code immediately. . . . Updates are automatic and run in the background for the Snap package." (I don't have an opinion on Snap as compared to Flatpak or AppImage or none of the 3.)

night-rider 3y ago

+1 AppImages. And the beauty is you can make them portable by creating a folder with the same name as the AppImage and append .home to the end, and boom: portable software. For example image-editor.AppImage image-editor.AppImage.home (folder, all settings are stored there)

zer0zzz 3y ago
Actually, I don't think I've tried AppImage. Does it do static linking or does it do something more similar to flatpak?
- account42 3y ago
  It's a self-mounting image so closer to flatpak than static linking but without the strict isolation.

account42 3y ago

Snaps will not work on anything but Ubuntu. AppImages are just a fancy self-mounting disk image. If you do it right and include all required contents then it will work ~anywhere but you can just as well do that in a .tar.{gz,xz,zstd}/whatever archive.

hollerith 3y ago
>Snaps will not work on anything but Ubuntu. I installed VSCode as a snap on my Fedora install and it worked fine as far as I could tell. This was in Mar 2021, and I chose the snap because code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux said that "Due to the manual signing process and the system we use to publish, the yum repo may lag behind and not get the latest version of VS Code immediately. . . . Updates are automatic and run in the background for the Snap package." (I don't have an opinion on Snap as compared to Flatpak or AppImage or none of the 3.)