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Yeah distributing desktop apps is a pain. I created Conveyor to solve that, see https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/ Quick feature set of interest to
by mike_hearn 2mo ago
Yeah distributing desktop apps is a pain. I created Conveyor to solve that, see https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/
Quick feature set of interest to your project:
• It's free for open source projects.
• It's a tool not a service so you can just download+go without even needing to sign up for an account.
• It can create signed, self updating Windows, Mac and Debian packages in one go, with a single run on any chosen host platform. So you can ship from Linux to Win/Mac without having those systems.
• Fully supports code signing, delta updates, other advanced stuff.
• Creates a nice download HTML page that detects the user's OS and CPU etc.
• Simple config file syntax.
Check it out, see if you like it.
- simjnd 2mo agoYou probably haven't read the article, but the software they build is a TUI, not a Desktop GUI (in fact a big chunk of the article is how they need to fight against Flatpak and AppImage because they are designed around the assumption of a GUI).
- mike_hearn 2mo agoConveyor is used to distribute itself and it's a CLI app. I also use it to distribute other CLI tools and servers. It has some systemd support, for instance. Albeit, the support for pure CLI apps on Windows/macOS isn't as strong as for GUI apps. There's an internal feature that isn't documented that's useful for it - it bundles a little GUI with a button that adds it to the user's path, and let's you trigger the self-update flow. We should expose that more obviously as a feature, although the incentive is low as most people distributing CLI apps and servers aren't paying customers.