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
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.
Hmm digikams site recommends the appimage
Don't take this the wrong way I personally would be cautious of trusting developers to package there own software.
I personally would use the flatpak https://flathub.org/apps/org.kde.digikam
Second best would be to use a container with a native package.
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
Do not use flatpak for firefox based browsers because it breaks it namespaces sandbox.
Firefox releases a portable binary that self updates.
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.
You don't have namespaces still...
For reference, chromium will not launch without that, you have to pass the
--no-sandboxflag 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
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?
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.
Such as?
EDIT:
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.
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=1to avoid having to install libfuse2 in those cases.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