Distribution independent application deployment systems for Linux

published Oct 09, 2018 10:25   by admin ( last modified Oct 11, 2018 11:13 )

There is:

  • AppImage,
  • Snap and
  • Flatpak.

AppImage seems to be a bit on the wane but seems to have a nice one-file put-anywhere file format. It can also run without any special components on the system. Snap is Ubuntu dominated and has sandboxing features built in. Flatpak (RedHat et al) also has sandboxing features, which features are also available separately as BubbleWrap.

Here some thoughts: Official Firefox is available in Snap from Snap's main repository. For flatpak there is a third party source, however a very reputable one. I like Snap's solution of having an official repo in between the developers and the machine, so that hopefully the application gets one more code review. Plus it's an official Firefox build in this case too.

Firefox is now available as a Snap package - OMG! Ubuntu!

Unofficial Firefox flatpak repository

An interesting thing is if AppImage could work on OpenBSD but no one seems to have tested it, or maybe it simply does not work AppImage for BSD · Issue #98 · AppImage/AppImageKit

I actually tried it now on OpenBSD with the appimage standard subsurface example app for Linux, and you get "Exec format error" with both the 32 and 64 bit version. You need to install bash to get that far and I also installed fuse but I think it croaked before that.

Ah: OpenBSD 6.0 tightens security by losing Linux compatibility | InfoWorld

Apparently there are big differences between OpenBSD and Linux:

  • Operating system syscall numbers
  • Method for calling syscalls.
  • OpenBSD passes all parameters on the stack while Linux does not

Linux chroot under OpenBSD /bin/bash: Exec format error