flatpaks installed, don’t appear in the menu or the app select

[ninosMember]

Brian Masinick wrote:

Flatpaks are not impossible to use with antiX

True.

In an old laptop with antiX 23.2 that I use for my experiments,
I finally noticed that in order for a flatpak to appear in the menu,
you need to execute the command
sudo ln -f -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/*.desktop /usr/share/applications && sudo desktop-menu –write-out-global
otherwise
the flatpak is installed, it appears in the flatpak list command result,
but it does not appear in the menu.
(And you need to run the command every time you install a new flatpak!)

I agree with Masinick, BobC, Robin, anticapitalX, above.
Personally, in my everyday antiX system I install software only from software installer or synaptic.
Luckily, the pre-installed stuff that antiX 23.2 full has is a real treasure.
I only needed to add just a few more.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by ninos.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by ninos.

using only various GNU/Linux distros, GhostBSD and Haiku
[perpetual antiX newbie]

[Brian MasinickModerator]

@ninos Thanks for getting back with us and acknowledging our comments; that really does matter because it validates the information that many of us take the time to share. I can’t speak for others, I can only share from my own efforts, experiments and work.

When snaps and flatpaks first came out, I DID give them a try. I found them cumbersome to add to the system I was using at the time, so without any further effort, I decided on my own that neither of them was for me.

As for AppImages, I also checked them out. I use them judiciously, mostly because they sometimes duplicate shared libraries and other codes, but they are much more useful in my opinion than the other two formats, and in isolated cases they are sometimes worth using. The AppImage format also permits the use of an option –appimage-extract, which creates a separate directory called squashfs-root/. Once you create this, you can optionally remove the AppImage and use the contents of squash-root instead.

As far as the frequency with which I use AppImages, to this day I’ve used them only to download Web Browser instances that were not readily available in binary form in our repo or Debian repos at the time of the download. One that I used before was Librewolf; it’s now available in .deb package format, so I don’t use the AppImage any more for Librewolf. The other two are Ungoogled Chromium and Helium. Both are available in other forms but AppImage has proven reliable and for just those two images the overhead wasn’t excessive; Most of my partitions aren’t over 25% full, so space is not my primary concern. Nevertheless if either of these packages ultimately has .deb formatted packages that are updated as timely as the AppImages, these could be removed from my system; meanwhile in these isolated cases the compromise is reasonable and I don’t mind doing it; is IS less convenient to have to remove old instances and replace them; I’ve NOT mastered any handy techniques to automatically update these tools, so that is the compromise and trade off for me.

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[Brian MasinickModerator]

CAREFUL note: our forum software just removed double dashed option – where it shows one dash before the appimage-extract there SHOULD be TWO dashes, so if you ever try out the extract alternative, be careful of the exact syntax; the one in my post above shows up INCORRECTLY.

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Brian Masinick
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