AppImage – Linux apps that run anywhere

Linux apps that run anywhere

“As a user, I want to download an application from the original author, and run it on my Linux desktop system just like I would do with a Windows or Mac application.””As an application author, I want to provide packages for Linux desktop systems, without the need to get it ‘into’ a distribution and without having to build for gazillions of different distributions.”

AppImage is an universal software package format that can be installed on any Linux OS without going through the traditional way of installation. It doesn’t require any root permission to install the software.

To install An AppImage, all you need to do is make it executable and run it. It is a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software.

So there is no extraction, no installation needed. You can uninstall it by deleting it. Just compare it to .exe in Windows that can run without installing it.

Some notable features of AppImage are:

• It can run on various different Linux distributions also on not so popular like Gentoo, Arch, Suse etc.
• There’s no need for installing and compiling software
• There’s no need for root permission and it’s Portable
• Software is uninstalled just by deleting the AppImage file itslef

Since an AppImage is not “installed”, you don’t need to “uninstall” it. Just delete the AppImage file and the application is gone. Additionally you may want to remove menu entry by deleting the desktop file from $HOME/.local/share/applications/.

Files and directories with names starting with a full stop (dot) (.example) are hidden – you might need to turn hidden files visible. You can probably find it somewhere in the settings of the file manager.

Using Terminal

Open any Terminal of your choice, head over to the app image directory and run:

chmod u+x <AppImageFileName>

Then you can now double click to run it, just like any other files on Windows.