[frmald]

I'll try to stay as on-topic as possible. I've searched for appimage recipes, I've found few results, but some other people having problems. It's in the interest of everyone "on the internet" (including me, searching at a later time) to document a solution somewhere in visible search results.

I'm not requesting any changes to the setup process, as I know all too well what a friendly / open-minded response I would run into. As I said in my initial post, I'm just here to report / document something that I spent time on, and which is not easy to figure out based on current search results.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

If your goal is simply to enable people that want a portable one-click redistributable because appimage, then that's great and I wish you the best of luck... But the correct medium for that is "wherever people go looking for curated collections of appimages".

There is no central place for publishing safe AppImage recipes, AFAICT, and documenting a clean, simple packaging was my main goal. Personally, I'm not keen on running random binaries downloaded from the internet. It's possible to have github build appimages automatically from an open source repo (e.g. there's a guy doing that for Firefox ESR) but I'll look at that at some other time.

Publishing a do-it-yourself guide here accomplishes nothing, since the only people who would be helped by it are the people who don't want to build an installer executable themselves, by hand. They want the output executable.

If your goal was to dissuade me from posting, rest assured that I remembered and anticipated quite well the kind of response I might expect on this forum... But, for documentation purposes, I think this was the right forum to post my report.

Kovid has repeatedly rejected recommendations to change the current official distribution format

Thankfully, the isolated install is good at touching nothing else but the target directory. OTOH, people don't want bare tarballs, so on top of FOSS software, there are various packaging / integration efforts. As you know, distro packages are hopefully outdated (perhaps because there is no "clean", package-able installation script, but who am I to judge).

accomplish nothing other than preventing resources such as shell completion, easy access to command line tools, desktop files for *all* the gui programs, proper use of the icon themes, and more, from being installed as intended and usable for the entire system.

First of all, WHAT desktop files? I had to write one by hand.

Most people don't want unsupervised installs (e.g. wget+sh), since you don't know what it does to your system, it provides no security in transferring the packages (wget+sh + MITM/hacked website etc) and it may pollute the filesystem with artifacts if the uninstallation fails (or is buggy).

If you need to save space that badly, use a filesystem that supports native compression. Or use a distro package, mine is 86 mb and not even optimized for size (it has 3 copies of every python file, including two versions of optimized bytecode).

MX Linux frugal-install here, with a zstd-compressed base (live) squashfs and btrfs+zstd overlays for home and root persistence. Had to hack the MX/antiX initrd for all this... But -- no need for Linux partitions, and the frugal directory, plus AppImage files, can simply be copied to other machines. I try to keep as many big apps out of the base squashfs, for upgradability and to be able to stay under the FAT32 4G limit.

Anyway, thank you for your thoughtful input. It's getting annoying to deal with endless reCAPTCHAs on top of reCAPTCHAs for the same IP on this forum, so I doubt I'll be here much longer.