Using Linux appimages

Are you interested in trying out appimages?  If so, let me share my experiences with appimages, to date.

For those who may not be aware, in addition to appimages there are  Flatpaks and Snaps. All are available to use to install & run Linux applications. Each offers its own strengths and weaknesses. It is important to know that all three are ‘fairly’ new to the ‘mass market’ scene.

I have tested and compared Flatpaks and Snaps before. (You may read about my experiences here.)

Appimage logoTo my mind, there are numerous reasons appimages are useful including that they:

  • Are distro agnostic; they run identically and equally well on arch, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, etc.
  • Support all Linux release models (so far as I can tell) including rolling, semi-rolling, traditional (stable release models).
  • Come with all application dependencies included.
  • Require no special environment or setup.
  • Are incredibly simple to use.

To get and use an appimage here is the process I recommend:

  • First and foremost, find a current, viable appimage. It is wise to use Google or similar to find application appmages. Try a string like: “LibreOffice-fresh appimage”.
  • Once you have found your appimage, download it on to your machine. I personally have a Dropbox directory cleverly named “appimage”. Using this directory insures my appimage files are backed up, and are easily located.
  • After downloading the appimage, set the appimage properties to “executable”; otherwise, it will not run.  How you do that likely varies by Desktop environment.
  • Once the image is executable, double-click on the appimage file and voila! A running application appears. Really, that’s all there is.
  • Optional: you may wish to add a launcher to your menu, dock, whatever so you have more ready access to your new application. Because I am using MXLinux (xfce4), I use the menu editor to place the launcher on my Whiskermenu. You probably have some similar tool available on your PC.

Now let me share the down-side of appimages.  I think these items are crucial if you want to ‘use’ appimages. (Perhaps broader appimage usage/popularity will cause the following issues to get resolved.

  1. I have not found a good centralized repository for accessing and downloading appimages.  None of the sites I have found list all available appimages (or even most).  The search facilities on each site are “shall we say” abysmal. Having said that here are the sites I find most useful:
    1. appimage Hub
    2. appimage (GitHub)
    3. probono / AppImages
  2. Not all appimages are kept current, there are many that seem to be snapshots of past releases of software, like Thunderbird, etc.
  3. Several major software providers, like LibreOffice, seem to prefer to keep their appimages on their own site(s). Not a bad idea when you see what sort of cruff that is laying around on the sites listed above.
  4. appimages do not follow any standard or common ‘update’ model.  Not all are updated. You will need to keep track of your own, manually. Sorry.

If you’d like to review another article on the topic, I recommend this one from FossMint.com.