fatmawati achmad zaenuri/Shutterstock.com
AppImages let Linux developers wrap their applications into a single file that installs on any Linux distribution. That simplifies things tremendously. Here’s how to use them, and integrate them into your desktop.
Installing Software on Linux
Installing software should be simple and convenient. How simple and how convenient that turns out to be is largely down to the package manager of your distribution. Package managers are software applications that let you download other Linux programs, and install them.
Derivative Linux distributions tend to use the package managers of their parent distribution. For example, the many Debian variants and derivatives use apt, the RedHat and Fedora distributions use dnf, and the Arch family of distributions use pacman. So, thankfully, there are not as many package managers are there are distributions.
Even so, from a developer’s point of view, supporting all the different package formats means wrapping your application into a DEB file for the Debian family, into an RPM for the RedHat family, and so on. That’s a lot of additional overhead.
It also means that if neither the developers nor…
Read Full Article Source
