Linux AppImage Finally Addresses Greatest Flaw!!

Key Takeaways

there was a time really not that long ago where app image was incredibly convenient and really simple to use all you would do is download the app image maybe rename it to make it a bit easier to find you would make it executable and then in your file manager double click it or from a terminal you would just run the file and then on pretty much any Linux system it would just load the application that time is kinda long pass now for quite a while app Images has basically been on life support any major reason for this is more and more distros choosing not to ship one of its dependencies completely destroying the selling point over other systems the idea of an app image is you download it and it runs no questions asked and it's very unclear from the app image website that there's even anything you need to install leading Linux distributions download an application make it executable and run no need to install no system libraries or preferences are altered can also run in a sandbox like fire jail and lists out all of these different distros here this one shouldn't even be on the list anymore distribute your desktop Linux application in the app image format and win users running all common Linux distributions package once and run everywhere reach users on all major desktop distributions and it doesn't even mention the dependency in the quick start guide literally all it says is you can run it or from the terminal you can run it the only mention of the dependency at least the only one that I can find is in the troubleshooting guide so it's like hey I get some errors related to something called fuse that is because your distro is missing lib fuse too this project had its last release all the way back on January 5th 2019 but that doesn't mean that lib fuse itself is over there's a lib fuse too so there's probably a lib fuse one and a live fuse three this is a maintenance release from the 2.9 branch of lib fuse users are encouraged to transition to the actively developed lib 3.x with its latest release being three weeks ago lib fuse 3.14.0 now unlike some projects that are done like d menu like St things like that where they don't need to be updated lib fuse 2 is not like lib fuse 2 has known security vulnerabilities it has known bugs and if you're going to be using lib views you should be updating to the three-point X branch and since the last update of 2.x was three years ago distros like Ubuntu stop shipping it in 22.04 and a lot of other distros out there basically just do what Ubuntu does now in most cases it is still going to be available in your repos it's just not going to be installed out of the box with the continuing rise of flat pack app image is basically just going to waste and nobody is going to make an app image if it doesn't really have any benefit over the other Solutions anymore but finally the app image developer accepts that there is a real problem not just the problem with live fuse too also the Alpine problem use lib View use three but before that quick explanation on what lib fuse actually is lib fuse it is a library for fuse fuse stands for file system in user space and this does basically what it says on the tin typically file system operations require you to be a privileged user typically the root user you don't want to just have a regular user you know making petitions deleting the boot petition so leaving this to the privileged user you know makes perfect sense but there are cases where you want to have a non-privileged user be able to you know mount a drive for example let's say they plug in a USB thumb drive let's say they have like a phone for example and they want to access its contents these are perfectly reasonable cases so what fuse lets you do is run that false system code in user space as a non-privileged user and then acts as a bridge to the Eternal functions and all the things that need to go on in the background to make a false system work it is by no means the quickest or most efficient way to handle file systems but for things like this it is perfectly functional and app image relies on this functionality let's get over to the I guess it's GitHub so we pull the request we are not interested in updating the major version of the statically linked live views all the time however it has been said that Upstream does not provide security fixes for lib fuse too anymore is there a link to this this was posted three days ago by the way so in the past three years he has not looked at the lib fuse repo to see that has not been updated literally look at the repo and you will see that none of these cves that exist granted there's not that many here are ever going to be addressed hence we should use lib fuse in the hope that the fuse project object will stay with that major version indefinitely which is not was not and never will be the goal of the lib fuse project at some point there will be a lib juice 4 at some point there will be a lib fuse five they're not gonna stay on lib fuse three that's just not how this works but there is a reason why he doesn't want to try and keep it updated with whatever's going on are there any compatibility guarantees with regard to fuse amount fuse amount three fuse amount and you know whatever version comes in the future app Images currently rely on the fuse amount binary being there some distributions are now shipping fuse amount 3 by default one day they might ship fuse Mount 4 fusel Mount n it would be very valuable to know for sure that versions of fuse amount will continue to be compatible to earlier ones so that things like go fuse could be made to work not just for fuse amount and fusel mount 3 but also for future versions there are no compatibility guarantees however multiple major versions of lib views are intended to be co-installable and the right version of fuse amount should be pulled in automatically through the dependency on the right lib view shared Library this is true the problem is that a lot of gestures just don't ship the version that app image is using because that version is dead now to work out how we got here let's go back to when Ubuntu basically killed app image when this happened the dev realized that something had to be done otherwise there's no reason to even use an app image from here he had a couple of different considerations one of them was actually removing the need for fuse amount the fuse amount command might change in the future currently some distributions are shipping fuse amount While others are shipping fuse amount three and at some point in the future they might ship other versions Upstream seems to make no compatibility guarantees regarding future versions of choose amount so we need to find a way to get rid of fuse amount all together and he had a tool that was doing it the problem is it required a root permissions and he even considered hatching lib fuse too having more than one live fuse doubles the maintenance burden in size so it is not something we should do instead we should patch lib fuse so that it tries in this order fuse amount fuse amount two fuse amount three so on and so forth until the end of time that patch would never be accepted because lib fuse 2 is a dead project and then eventually this all circled back to a completely separate issue from 2018. if you're an Alpine Linux user you've probably noticed that app Images have never worked because app Images are dynamically linked against libc Alpine Linux being a non-gunu system does not have glib C so app Images don't work the plan here is to statically link them instead but this plan also helps with lib fuse as well if lib fuse is statically linked assuming that it still works with the current kernel so an app image should theoretically work on any distribution whatsoever here's the problem though initially when he was planning to do the static linking he was going to statically link against lib fuse 2. this once again was being discussed this year there was no reason why in 2023 you would statically link against lib fuse too so then he decided wait maybe we should statically link against lib fuse 3 instead yes correct this is where we should have been from the start and there is an experimental build tool for doing this static linking but it's experimental so it's gonna take a while for things you know get ready to be used by everyone so here's my prediction app image is going to have the ability to be statically linked against lib fuse 3 and then three four five years from now the exact same thing is going to happen lib fuse 3 is no longer going to be updated you're supposed to move to lib fuse 4 and app image is not going to do so and then the developer is going to say hmm are there any links to show that lib fuse 3 is no longer being updated I haven't looked at the repo in three years I have no idea and you know what the same thing will probably happen once again app image is a really weird project it sort of frames itself as this really useful tool that would be great for everybody to use but it's kind of maintained as if it's a personal project for the developer and there's nothing wrong with either of these things happening the problem is when they happen at the same time pick one or the other and it'll give people a better understanding of whether they should or shouldn't use app image but let me know your thoughts do you think they should do the static linking do you think it's not really that big of a deal you have to just install a package and they work I would love to know and if you liked the video go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out my patreon scrub Silly Bear pay Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and use flat pack [Applause] [Music]