AppImageLauncher 2.1.1 has been released today. Read on to see what’s new in today’s version as well as the previous release 2.1.0.
Release 2.1.0
The last release, version 2.1.0, included a significant novelty: AppImageLauncher received a new logo! It was designed by a friendly user called Anachronox. Since the old logo was very similar to the ones of other projects (e.g., the distro Netrunner), I came to the conclusion it makes sense to replace our old logo. I also think it looks really well, and works really well at large as well as small scale (16x16 px). Thanks again to Luis Vásquez, who created the awesome original icon. I still like it very much.
Due to an annoying dependency bug that was really annoying to fix (caused in libappimage, which we use as a dependency), we previously had to provide binaries for almost every distro release we support. This was very annoying. However, it could be sorted out and we’re now getting away with two builds for nearly all Ubuntu/Debian releases again. For more information, check the compatibility table.
The first run dialog received some improvements by reducing the amount of widgets, which simplifies the design and makes it more accessible to less tech savvy users. A minor fix was to actually show the icon in the settings dialog window.
The release was published on December 1, 2019, already, but I hadn’t got to posting a release announcement yet.
Release 2.1.1
The current release 2.1.1 first introduces official support and maintenance for ARM devices. We support 32-bit devices as well as 64-bit ones and provide official binaries built as part of the Travis CI build system.
Raspbian, the official distribution for the Raspberry Pi, only provides 32-bit images as of now. This is likely due to their wish of having a single image that works across all their devices, but it’s a bit annoying as since Pi 3, they integrate 64-bit CPUs. As those devices are relatively widely used, the decision was made to build 32-bit binaries in addition to the 64-bit ones, which have been tested successfully on several iterations of the Raspberry Pi (including the latest Raspberry Pi 4 as well as a Raspberry Pi Zero). It took a while to figure out how to build them exactly, in the end this involved installing Docker on a Raspberry Pi 3 and some trial-and-error.
For 64-bit devices and distributions (there are e.g., Gentoo and Arch for the Raspberry Pi), there’s also official 64-bit .deb packages available. Those have been tested successfully on a Pinebook using KDE Neon.
A minor usability improvement was contributed by user @RogueScholar, who added a missing dependency
to the .deb packages released on GitHub.
Thanks for your help to make AppImageLauncher better!
Further improvements included fixing the integration command of ail-cli, the CLI companion application provided together with AppImageLauncher,
and making AppImageLauncher avoid integrating symlinks.
Where to get the new AppImageLauncher
You can download up-to-date binaries for all platforms supported upstream (Debian and some RPM based distributions with the classic AppImageLauncher, almost any somewhat recent distribution with AppImageLauncher Lite) from the GitHub release page.
If you encounter any issues, please don’t hesitate to open an issue on GitHub. This is the only way we, the developers, get a chance to analyze the problem and eventually provide a fix. Posting your problems in some distribution specific forums is not very useful, since we can’t monitor them all. So, please, consider posting your issue on GitHub, if you find any. Also, you can create issues for feature proposals there.