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Update check on Ubuntu points to Appimage instead of deb file

See original GitHub issue

I’ve just checked updates and clicked Download button. I was directed to download cerebro-0.2.6-x86_64.AppImage file, while expectation is to download cerebro_0.2.6_amd64.deb (current version 0.2.5 is installed from deb file). Is this something that might be improved?

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 7 years ago
Reactions:1
Comments:10 (4 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

maximbazcommented, Feb 13, 2017

snaps are also supported other distros, I think devs want them to be as universal as AppImage. However this particular format is built by Ubuntu folks, and so they naturally target Ubuntu first. In reality I haven’t heard anyone outside of Ubuntu using snaps (yet?).

I’d say ideally you should provide all 4, Snaps / Flatpack / AppImage / deb, plus sources. With these four you would literally cover almost everyone’s needs, and the rest will gladly build from sources. Electron-builder doesn’t support Flatpack yet though.

When choosing a default, consider what benefits you could achieve by that. In my mind, you definitely want to ensure that as many people as possible use the latest version, and thus do not experience and do not report bugs that have already been fixed. This means prioritizing the formats that provides either fully automatic updates or native integration with OS package manager. But that also means investing time to investigate how exactly to provide this (for .deb you would need to provide PPA, for others I imagine there’s something else to configure).

1reaction

maximbazcommented, Feb 13, 2017

Ubuntu is moving away from .deb though, the future standard will be snap packages. Here’s why. Internally .deb files are still used as I understand, but the end-users will be using snaps.

Snaps / Flatpack / AppImage are three different formats with a very similar purpose, to improve packaging and distribution of applications. Differences are listed for example here.

How to choose today:

If the upgrade process is manual, use AppImage as it is simpler and independent of Linux distro.
If a native integration with OS package manager is desired (so that updates are coming automatically), the format depends on the OS. For Ubuntu, that could only be snaps or .deb.