What does HackerNews think of AppImageLauncher?

i completely agree. for me, the only issues i've had with appimages are "housekeeping" UX:

* i know they can technically be updated but i really have no idea how. would be cool to see a de-facto solution similar to sparkle[0] on mac

* i use appimagelauncher[1] to integrate with my menus etc but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't? i haven't really figured out the rhyme or reason

[0] https://sparkle-project.org/

[1] https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher

Try this: https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher

I believe most projects that serve debs from their own download page do not try to package for each distro separately, and instead opt to package up requirements as needed.

I can't comment deeply on deb vs rpm, it is kinda disappointing that we have this split, and I don't know if there's a great way to merge it back.

Mac does have a good distribution story. This also exists on Linux in the form of app images. The one missing piece is that Mac has the Applications convention. AppImageLauncher[0] solves this, but really it would be good for Gnome/KDE to just integrate this concept. That gives the (important!) "have the application show up in the application launcher" option.

I do not believe one could qualify Windows programs as being distributed as a single binary. A single installer, perhaps! But many Windows programs dump files all over your file tree to do things, and then goes to touch stuff in your registry. There's a reason we have "portable executables" for windows as its own download option!

[0]: https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher

> there is no built-in way to trivially install a .desktop file for a given AppImage I've downloaded

Here it is.[0,1]

[0] https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher

[1] https://docs.appimage.org/reference/desktop-integration.html

I posted this above, but at least for me, this project seems to do the trick: https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher

I did use a terminal to install the AUR package on my system, however. ;)