Hi everyone, I have been getting back into photography lately and switched to using linux full time about a year ago.

I ended up deciding to use digikam as my photo library management tool and then edit in darktable. both applications I decided to use the appimage for easier use and to have the necessary dependencies to get things like opencl to work, (I had a hard time getting it to work with the .deb)

now I also use multiple machines and recently learned that you can create .home and .config folders for each appimage to have all their settings etc save there, and it seems that this would make it pretty portable.

would it be a bad idea to for example keep the appimages and their folders in a synchronized folder like with nextcloud to use the same* appimage across machines. I never have the same machine on at a time but it would be nice to have all the settings sync’d but im not sure it would then break something since two machines use nvidia gpus and the other uses an amd gpu

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    3·
    12 days ago

    You wouldn’t be able to reliably map the XDG config folders you’re mentioning to a network share. You won’t have any issues running the appimage from a network share though. Just take a finalized config and drop it in the same location as the appimage and copy it where you need it.

    An alternative would be to have a network mount with a portable user config for your entire profile, but it’ll be quite a bit of work and require some pam finagling.

    • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      ok so a network share wouldnt be a good idea but what about a sync tool like nextcloud where it will just make a new copy to any machine I sync the nextcloud folder too?

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
    2·
    12 days ago

    I was under the impression that appimage saved all configs inside its image and did not need anything exteranl configured??? I hope to use it to make it easier to upgrade and change my machines and distros.

    • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      I thought so too but then I noticed after I created the .home and .config folders next to the appimage and launched digikam it was like a first time setup, so i went looking for digikam files in my own .home folder and copied it over to the new digikam.appimage.home folder and launched it it was like it was before with all my settings etc configured so I guess appimages do save things to your user home folder

      https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/portable-mode.html

      • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
        3·
        12 days ago

        I know i have taken a firefox and launched it on another host and it seemed to have kept the settings I changed on the first machine. Im still way early in testing.

        • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          it probably depends on the software and what it is set to use, digikam stores stuff it downloads for facial recognition and stuff in a home folder so now that I create the digikam.appimage.home folder it uses that which is nice

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      2·
      12 days ago

      Appimage is an immutable exe. Like a CD ISO It stores config in a home folder variable location.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    12·
    12 days ago

    I would strongly recommend that you avoid Appimages. They are very dated and depend on legacy stuff that often was dropped by the distro. They are also terrible for security since there is no way of pushing out updates.

    • Samueru_sama@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      They are very dated and depend on legacy stuff that often was dropped by the distro

      Is it libfuse2? This has no longer been a dependency with the static appimage runtime, which released in 2022!

      Although most notable, electron apps still by default use the old runtime, because electron-builder hasn’t updated the appimage runtime.

      Besides that AppImage do not depend on legacy stuff.

      They are also terrible for security since there is no way of pushing out updates.

      This was never true lmao.

        • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          Thank you ill look into flatpaks more, I use the flatpak for firefox as I noticed it looked much newer than the popos shop deb

            • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
              1·
              6 days ago

              Processes are still isolated through nested seccomp filters.

              Would highly recommend against anything that “updates itself.” That is just ripe for supply chain attacks and unwanted features. You want someone in the stream to do some sort of validation.

              I also don’t want every app trying to check for updates. There is a reason we use centralized management.

              • Samueru_sama@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                6 days ago

                Processes are still isolated through nested seccomp filters.

                You don’t have namespaces still…

                For reference, chromium will not launch without that, you have to pass the --no-sandbox flag and brave iirc disabled that all together.

                Not really an issue with chromium because you do have working namespaces sandbox thru zypack, although some disagree that this is safe

                Would highly recommend against anything that “updates itself.”

                Disable the self updates in that case… before you were saying that AppImages had no way to self update and now are saying that you don’t recommend it?

                You want someone in the stream to do some sort of validation.

                Also what validation are we talking about? the one that flathub does? The most you will get is recognizing that the application comes from upstream, you can even ship pre-compiled binaries thru flathub.

                There is a reason we use centralized management.

                Such as?

                EDIT:

                I also don’t want every app trying to check for updates.

                With AppImage you have this outside the application thru the zsync delta updates, the info is embedded in the appimage and it is checked by appimageupdatetool, appimagelauncher, and similar and let you know when there is an update available without the application itself doing the check.

              • Samueru_sama@programming.devEnglish
                2·
                6 days ago

                Thank you, it seems every way I go i make the wrong choice lol

                Welcome to linux.

                What you were told about appimage depending on legacy stuff is also not true, it is the libfuse2 dependency, which hasn’t been a dependency of AppImage for 3 years (though some projects haven’t updated yet).

                It also isn’t a big deal if you run into an appimage that still depends on it, archlinux which is a rolling release distro, some of its packages like mtpfs and ntfs-3g still depend on libfuse2 as well. And you can still run the AppImage by setting the env variable APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1 to avoid having to install libfuse2 in those cases.

                • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
                  1·
                  5 days ago

                  maybe you can help guide me, I borked my video drivers on my desktop trying to get opencl to run on darktable with my 7900xtx gpu on popOS

                  I guess popOS just has older drivers or something and following guides on how to update led me to getting videos to stutter all the time now so Im planning to do a fresh install, would you recommend another distro that might have its drivers more up to date? I am thinking of trying out fedora as I heard that updates much faster than popOS