Not all Linux apps are created equal. When you’re a newbie, you’ll probably find out the hard way that x app for Ubuntu doesn’t work on Fedora, and one for Fedora doesn’t work on Arch. It depends on what packages your distro uses. While Ubuntu uses DEB packages, Fedora uses RPM, for example.
This inconvenience has been greatly improved by things like Flatpak and Canonical’s Snap with its centralized repositories. But long before the advent of those “universal” packages, we already had an AppImage, a way to package Linux apps with all their dependencies so that they work in any distro, and recently we have something that works very well as an “app store” in this format.
AppImage is one of the best Linux software distribution formats
AppImage comes from the early 2000s, it came to be called “Klik”, and they were also known as “PortableLinuxApps“. Their great advantage is that they are basically an image of the application (similar to an .iso file) that does not require installation or administrator permissions to work.
It’s probably the closest thing to Windows .exe that you’re going to find on Linux. AppImage offers portable applications, packaged in a single file with all its dependencies, regardless of the distribution used.
AppImage is probably the closest thing to a Windows .exe that you will find on Linux
Until now, one of the best resources to find applications in this format was to go to the AppImageHub website, where there are more than 1,000 apps and counting. Now we can also install our own “AppImageHub App Store” thanks to the AppImagePool project.
AppImagePool is an AppImageHub client built on Flutter compatible with any distro you can imagine, fully open, non-profit, with fast downloads, support for version history, easy update and downgrade of appimages, which is also organized in simple categories.
Of course, to install it on your distro you have the option of downloading the AppImage, but you can also install it using Flatpak:
- Install:
flatpak install flathub io.github.prateekmedia.appimagepool
- Run:
flatpak run io.github.prateekmedia.appimagepool
It is certainly an interesting project worth trying, and it allows you to use one of the best software distribution formats for Linux that is sometimes ignored more than it deserves, especially considering how efficient and headache free it tends to be.