Portable configuration data

hi @probono – thanks for all your work.

Right now, Cisco are developing WebEx support for Linux.

I’ve tried to make the argument for AppImage, but joe follows on up-voting availability on his particular distro and says +1 for fedora and sue says +1 for redhat and alex says +1 for CentOS.

After years, Cisco relents and commits to develop WebEx desktop client for Linux

@dawnstar raised the issue of removable media and file shares. We use thin clients. For every app I have to write a launcher that looks for the AppImage (or un-tarballed bundle) on USB and on file share.

While preservation of user configs, perhaps balanced by the need to have test configs – the focus of your discussion is important, it isn’t as important to me as the need to stop home thrashing. (I could also add stop home ballooning – I’ll come to that).

So, many of my launchers do re-define $HOME to /tmp/$USER.

Configs in $HOME isn’t (from my POV) the problem; it’s heavily volatile files that are heavily written-to. Apart from becoming the limiting factor to the responsiveness of the apps, is $HOME is on flash, thrashing flash trashes flash. (Yes, I have those databases that Mozilla thunderbird email and firefox browser, ditto Chrome, in mind).

AppImage simplifies app updating since no (re)installation is required.

It remains problematic if app developers insist on implementing in-app updates to $HOME (sometimes bypassing redefinition by consulting the password file). If Zoom or whoever put out some enormous electron update and within a day or two you’ve got tens, hundreds or potentially thousands of copies in user homes, that’s to be a bigger fish to fry.

Precisely. We want AppImages to be read-only by design. An “update” is, in fact, downloading the new version without throwing away the old version, so that the user can decide to delete the old one only after they have confirmed the new one works for them.

Precisely and a convention for naming AppImages with their version number would help. I’ve run-out of fingers to count the number of times I’ve had to launch an AppImage and find my way to the About to work-out where the stored AppImage version stands in relation to one seen published out there.

ApplicationName_1.0.0_x86_64.AppImage is the naming convention.