Keep Your Snaps and Flatpaks, I'll Take AppImages!

you know it kind of pains my heart a little bit when i hear people talk about snaps and flat packs so much and they never really give app image the credit that it deserves then there's so many people in the linux space that never give app images any kind of lip service right they talk about how horrible snaps are and flat packs are better or how flat packs are horrible and snaps are better but nobody ever really talks about what is truly the best option out there as far as a universal package format and that of course is app image here recently i've seen a lot of linux content creators talk about how canonical is completely screwed up snap packages nobody's really using snap packages as much anymore and it seems like flat pack has won the battle like it's some kind of game or something right flat pack is one so we're going to get rid of snaps you know nobody should use snaps everybody quit using snaps it's backed by evil corporation canonical let's go and all jump on the flat pack bandwagon which is backed by a corporation red hat right yeah that makes a lot of sense for us the community how about we we try a community based project how about app image an app image in my opinion has some real advantages to both snaps and flat packs for one thing they're a lot easier to install and work with another thing they're they're a lot easier to create your own and take with you as far as a portable option and the other thing i really like about app images is you know with theme integration it seems to be better than snaps and flat bags for the most part and not that any of them are perfect in that aspect but i really think app image just for whatever reason doesn't get enough credit and today i wanted to show you guys that maybe haven't taken a look at app image in a serious way how you can go about finding quickly some popular app images and get them installed on your system now there is one important distinction we need to make between app images and snaps and flat packs snaps and flat packs there's one central repository you go to get all of your snaps and flat packs right snaps have the snap store flat pack has flat hub that's where you go to get all of your flat packs the snap stores where you go to get all of your snaps app image is decentralized meaning anybody can create an app image and you can put that thing anywhere on the internet right there's no central store central repository you're supposed to go put your app images in right and that makes app image a truly decentralized platform which is great for those of us that like that sort of thing most of us in the free and open source community like decentralization but the problem is discoverability how am i going to find all the app images that are out there if they're not all in one spot well app image in the last couple of years has kind of tried to fix this problem by creating app imagehub.com so this is kind of similar to the snapstore to flatum right it's designed to be a store where all the app images are but you have to actually go and put your app images here like if you create an app image you need to go to app image hub and make sure it's listed on app imagehub.com and the good thing is most of the big companies that are packaging their stuff as an ad image do put their stuff here so app image hub really does kind of serve as a central hub and if this is your very first time installing app images what you want to do go to app imagehub.com and install what is the app image launcher now on the front page of app image hub they have a link to app image launcher click on that link and then once you get to this page you go over here to the download button and you have uh releases and app image launcher go to releases that should just link you to where they're hosting the the releases of app image launcher which is on github and it looks like they package it in a whole bunch of different formats a tarball an rpm a deb of course they package it as an app image download the app image i've already got app image launcher installed so i don't have to download it and then once you have it installed what you want to do is you want to go find some app images to install so i'm going to browse all apps here on the app image hub and say the very first one libre wolf maybe i want to install that and i'll go to the download button for the libre wolf app image and i'm not sure which version to get because they truncated the name so i'm not sure which is like the latest version or if they have different versions for 32-bit and 64-bit i'm gonna assume the second one in the list is the correct version for me i'll choose download and of course your browser will open up the file picker and it's going to ask where do you want to download the librewolf app image now here's the thing if you're new to app images you should create a folder in your home directory called applications with a capital a that's where app images really should live on your system you should put them in your home directory slash applications with a capital a so make that directory and then start saving all of your app images that you find all over the internet put them there so i'm going to save the librewolf app image there to that directory let that download and now i'm going to open up my graphical file manager and i'm going to go into the applications directory in my home directory and all i need to do is find librewolf now by default these app images are not executable you'd have to change permissions to make sure they're executable on your system also ad images sometimes have trouble integrating with your menu systems if you're using these as part of a desktop environment your menu system and gnome or kde or xfce may not recognize these app images well remember we installed the app image launcher so right click on any app image the very first time you run it and choose app image launcher it's going to run it with the app image launcher and that should solve any permission problems as far as being able to run it and you only really have to do that the first time it should create a desktop entry so any menu systems should recognize your app images and we just launched the libre wolf app image and everything looks fine there if i go to distro dot tube let's make sure you know it just loads web pages just fine here taking a minute is my website slow or it's libre wolf slow it's down it's transferring objects from google apis i do use some google fonts on my website but man that website loaded slow let's try another one google maybe just google is slow today yeah google takes some time to load too but anyway that's the libre wolf a very popular fork of firefox that's built for privacy and security reasons and available as an app image now that is really easy to go and get your app images now that you know what the app image hub is that particular website and now that you've got the app image launcher installed it's as easy as downloading an app image and then right clicking on it and running it and after that it should be a part of any kind of menu system i actually have my app images set up to where my home directory and the applications directory is part of my path so even in d menu i could do a search for an app image if i actually just do a search for app image you'll see caden live dot app imaging i've got two different versions of tayden live installed as an amp image so i can actually launch app images from d menu now not everybody is going to want to go to app image hub to browse for app images a lot of people want a proper app store right a software center well we have one now it is not listed on ab image hub but there's a couple of them out there but one recent one that's made a lot of headlines i've seen it mentioned on a couple of different linux news sites is app image pool and that's pool uh p-o-o-l as in jump in the pool so add image pool and it again you can't get this on app image hub i don't know why they're not listed on the hub but if you go to their github and go to get app image you should find the downloads for app image pool x8664.app image download that and then once again once you've got it downloaded you go into your file manager the very first time you run it you want to right click on it and make sure you run it with the app image launcher and this is app image pool it's basically your software center it said that's a software center for app images and what is it querying to get all these app images it's the app image hub now app image pool is pretty neat you can have the grid view here or you can do a list view where you get apps in a list i actually prefer the the grid view but it's very slick and quite quite modern looking some of the icons look a little crazy but of course this is not app image pools you know doing us these are icons probably uploaded by the developers of these applications right some of them look kind of janky but you know a lot of people that program are not like graphical artists or anything i will say the the scroll bar there is a little weird to work with but from here you could search for something but one of the things i have noticed with this particular application although most of the applications on app image hub come up just fine it does not know about a lot of app images that are on the app image hub for example remember we installed libre wolf when i searched for libra wolf in app image pool no results found even though that's probably the most popular hadn't been shot at imagehub right i know brave has an app image i don't know if brave is listed on the hub but you know it's not here i do know movie moned which is a movie player written in haskell is available as an app image from the hub because i've installed it from the hub before i've actually got it right now in my applications folder but when i do a search for movie moned it is not here so but you know let's install a couple of the things that do come up in the search results so if i go under i will go under the system tools because that's where we'll find some interesting stuff to play with for example the koch shell so this is a shell and it's actually kind of neat i've actually played with conch in the past i think i've done a video or two on conch uh a while back uh two three years ago let me download the conch app image that's actually interesting that you can launch a shell as an app image that's pretty cool so we'll download that uh what else would we download let me download powershell microsoft powershell download and no app image found in this release so yeah so it's looking for a specific version of powershell and but then it says no app image found and i've had this happen on a few apps that i've chosen uh this is not the first time i've had this happen so powershell even though it comes up it's there's some kind of bug with it right uh let's see how about uh edex ui which is a terminal emulator i did a video about that about three four years ago and let's download the 64-bit version of that yeah that looks like that's going to download just fine for us and let's do one other i know there is hyper in here somewhere there's a terminal called hyper that i know is on the hub it may not come up let me go to the others category well that is weird when i go to the others category maybe it only searches by category so if i go explore and search hyper okay so you got to make sure that you're on explore now let me now that i've done that let me make sure that libre wolf really yeah libra wolf is still not here though libreoffice is here so but hyper was here so i was going to install that just three ab images just as a test and then i'll launch all three just to make sure they run properly so let me go back into pc man fm and the first one i downloaded was conch now i'm going to right click and launch it with the app image launcher now conch is a shell a shell has to launch in a terminal so running it does nothing right so even though i ran it the very first time with app image launcher you didn't see anything happen it's because we actually need to be in a terminal to run a shell of course i'm going to cd into applications and now what i'm going to do is actually launch conch and then i'll tab complete the rest of the path conch dot add image and let's see if it switches yeah it switched my shield i was in the fish shield and you see the prompt change and you get a message welcoming you to the con shield if i do it ls you can see it's a little bit different kind of output than the fischel or the bad shield and what else did i download i downloaded edex ui so let's launch that with the app image now this is a terminal emulator it's written in electron and it has a lot of whiz-bang effects it's really just for show it's just to pretend like you're a hacker neat little program though this particular program here and it launches just fine let me kill edex ui let me go ahead and try the hyper terminal right click and since it's the very first time i'm launching it launch it with the app image launcher and this is hyper hyper.js i believe is the full name for this particular terminal and this terminal i believe is written in electron as well so that's a little bit of what you can do with app image pool so you know app images are pretty easy to work with i mentioned they're pretty easy to make your own app images too as well and because they're just a single file right you create your own app images or you even take these app images and you can modify them and configure them to your heart's content and then you can take them to another machine right you can put them on a flash drive and take these things with you and it really makes app image in my opinion the best format out of the three as far as snaps flat backs app images again people love talking about snaps especially they love trashing snaps and then now it's become really trendy here lately to talk about how flat packs have one we just need to quit talking about snaps and everybody just jump on the bandwagon with flat packs no that's not the way it works in free and open source software i'm not going to let you guys do that because i refuse i'm also going to talk about app images because i think ab images deserve some love and i for one am going to continue using them i don't care what anybody else uses right and not to be honest you guys shouldn't care what anybody uses find out what works for your particular use case and if it's working for you keep doing it if it's not try something else if you haven't tried app images give them a try you might be pleasantly surprised now before i go i need to thank a few special people the producers of the show devon gabe james matt michael mitchell's paul scott wes allen armor dragon chuck man riggery die yo quad dylan george lee the linux ninja max mike eryan alexander p sergeant fedor polytechnic prophet steven willie these guys these guys are my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about admin just would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm just sponsored by you guys the community right i'm community sponsored i'm like app images right those other guys they're flat packs and snaps dt he's an app image piece gus yeah go check out my patreon too

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 52,713

Keywords: snap packages, snap vs flatpak, appimage vs snap vs flatpak, appimage vs flatpak, arch linux, open source, fedora flatpak, linux how to, gnu linux, app store, ubuntu linux, linux help, linux mint, linux appimage, appimage tutorial, free software, linux, install appimage, appimage, snap packages are slow, free and open source software, linux packaging, package software for linux, best linux packages, what is appimage, distrotube, appimagehub, appimage launcher

Id: Yk6kaaoTKmE

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022