Gear Lever as an appimage

[DutchPete]

I love Gear Lever, so much easier than AppLauncher, and it always works, in contrast to AL.
How come an app to manage appimages is not packed in an appimage itself?

[mijorus]

Because it's very hard to pack a gtk app.
I tried and failed multiple times, at the end I realised it wasn't worth the effort.

There aren't many Gtk apps released as app images if you notice: most app images are Electron apps

[Azathothas]

If you are up for maintaining or at least updating gearlever on nixOs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/by-name/ge/gearlever/package.nix on every release

You can use something like nixappimage to do it quite easily.
We maintain an appimage for gearlever over at Soarpkgs: https://github.com/pkgforge/soarpkgs/blob/main/packages/gearlever/nixappimage.nixpkgs.stable.yaml

It can be installed with soar

$ soar search gearlever
[-] gearlever#nixpkgs.gearlever:pkgcache (nixappimage-2.3.2) - Manage AppImages with ease (319.04 MiB)

A Demo on Alpine Musl, without flatpak

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I am aware of: #186
And also the comment on Unofficial AppImage: #221

Suffice to say, we (pkgforge) won't have any problems should you decide to link this on the readme
Cheers!

[Samueru-sama]

Because it's very hard to pack a gtk app.

GTK apps are not hard to make AppImages of. As long as you don't involve webkit2gtk that is.

Python apps are hard though.

EDIT:

There aren't many Gtk apps released as app images if you notice: most app images are Electron apps

Inkscape, mission-center, cpu-x, and now gimp (after some trouble not related to gtk) all come as AppImage as well, and both gimp and inkscape use the deploy everything mode of go-appimage, that is the AppImage works on systems without glibc even.

Deadbeef is another gtk app that while it doesn't come as an AppImage, it releases a mostly portable binary instead. Ryujinx did something similar before they moved away from GTK as well.