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Comment by Pneumaticat | Hacker News Reader

FYI, AppImages do not run anywhere. There are a lot of issues with them in NixOS, since NixOS is all about having explicitly-linked dependencies, and AppImages still often have implicit dependencies that aren't in the image itself, since they are assumed to exist on the host system.

See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/51060 for an example.

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Yeah, AppImages are not really comparable to snap and Flatpak, which both address this issue by managing shared sets of libraries as well as applications. Flatpak calls these sets of libraries "runtimes", and snap calls them "base snaps". The metadata for each application declares one runtime or base snap that it uses.

This ability to easily provide different userlands to different applications is one of the critical advantages of these new application formats.

Something you can do always on a Linux system as a user is to run the AppImage with

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ./Your*.AppImage

and, before that, put all the missing dynamic libraries in the same path. That task might however be nontrivial due to (hiearchical/nested) dependencies (try "ldd *.so" to inspect it) of the so files itself. That's one of the reasons why we have package managers at the first place...

It also requires FUSE to work, which may not be available.

but who really uses NixOS? a 0.001% of linux users?

How did you came up with that number ?

In my circle, roughly 30%.

There are dozens of us.

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