this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
742 points (93.9% liked)
linuxmemes
21393 readers
1413 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudo
in Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, like, dumb question. People here assumed that I mean AppImages, whereas I actually meant just a statically linked binary. Is that really the only reason why AppImage exists? So, that dynamically linked applications can be distributed like statically linked ones?
You cannot statically link everything. Take graphics libraries and APIs for example, do you statically link against nvidia's or mesa's opengl?
Sure, but presumably AppImage/Flatpak/Docker cannot help with that either...?
This is the problem those tools try to solve. They package everything else upon which software might depend that can’t simply be linked into a single binary.
Flatpak solves the problem with targetable platform versions, you just update the manifest for your app every like 6-12 months to target the new one
Ah, interesting. So, it's different from just statically linking against the latest driver lib every 6-12 months, because the Flatpak runtime gives you a bit of a guarantee that there won't be breaking changes in the meantime.
Bingo, and if the latest mesa breaks your app for example, you can target an older one until it's fixed instead of end users having to fuck around downgrading system packages
The majority of AppImages I've seen have been dynamically linked, yes. But it's also used for packaging assets.
Yeah, alright, packaging assets makes sense. I've always been fine with just a .tar.gz, but having it be a singular file without compression is cool.
I guess, since AppImage emulates a filesystem, you can also have your application logic load the assets from the same path as if the assets were installed on the OS, so that's also cool.
You cannot statically link everything. Take graphics libraries and APIs for example, do you statically link against nvidia's or mesa's opengl?