What are appimages ?

When you install an applicaton in Linux the applicaton usually have some dependencies. Suppose I’ve downloaded an applicaton manim and the applicaton has dependencies:

  • ffmpeg
  • cairo
  • pango headers

Then if i don’t have all these applicatons in my system manim won’t work. Why ? : Because it’s dependent on them

What appimages did is they’ll provide you everything in that single file (i.e. one don’t have to care about what dependencies my program has)

Another thing is that appimages doesn’t have to be installed on your system. You can run the applicaton simply by running that file

Since appimages aren’t installed on your system, you can’t see them as applicaton in your applicaton launcher. But we can easily solve this issue by creating a desktop file for that file

How to make a appimage behave like a desktop native applicaton ?

Desktop Entry for Appimages

We are taking example of Obsidian

  1. Download:- PNG for Obsidian

  2. Create a file named Obsidian.desktop Put the following Code into that file

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Obsidian
Comment=Obsidian
Icon=/home/himanshu/AppImages/obsidian.png
Exec=/home/himanshu/AppImages/Obsidian-0.12.19.AppImage
Terminal=false
Categories=Education
Desktop

No need to make this file executable

  1. Put this .desktop file into ~/.local/share/applications

Log out and Log In again

Make appimage default for some file type

Method 1: Go to the file in Thunar and make the appImage as default

Method 2: Go to .config/mimeapps.list and add under the section [Added Associaton]:

  • text/csv=LibreOffice.desktop; : This is to make LibreOffice appimage a default for csv file