Interested users

[Samueru-sama]

I just made an AppImage of puddletag, hopefully you find it useful, it even has working qt5ct theme support.

@RafaelLinux @Perkolator @dannn-o @Pastim

Decided to spam here because the maintainer even locks the issues where appimage gets mentioned...

puddletag/puddletag#916
puddletag/puddletag#464
puddletag/puddletag#408

[RafaelLinux]

First of all, thank you for your time and for letting those of us who are interested know about it. Your contribution is really appreciated, because it makes life easier for those of us who know the virtues of AppImages and the huge disadvantages of Snap and especially Flatpak, which go unnoticed by users. I also don't understand the developer's ‘veto’ to even be able to comment on the subject ... it really seems absurd to me.

I just tried it and the only ‘weird’ thing (and that I find annoying) is that the icons are not visible (probably because of the theme) and the text is not the same size (more noticeable in directory tree) and the icons of the folders are not visible, as you can see in attached screenshot:

[Perkolator]

disadvantages of Snap and especially Flatpak, which go unnoticed by users

What is wrong with the Flatpak?

[RafaelLinux]

To cut a long story short, in its default configuration, Flatpak ‘devours’ the user's partition storage, without the user's knowledge. To make matters worse, changing this behaviour is not trivial.

I discovered this when I ran out of space in ‘Home’ some time ago.

[Samueru-sama]

First of all, thank you for your time and for letting those of us who are interested know about it. Your contribution is really appreciated, because it makes life easier for those of us who know the virtues of AppImages and the huge disadvantages of Snap and especially Flatpak, which go unnoticed by users. I also don't understand the developer's ‘veto’ to even be able to comment on the subject ... it really seems absurd to me.

Thanks, I am also baffled by the tone of the lead dev, he even locked the issue where I commented for an appimage while puddletag was broken due to a pyparsing update, of which there was a PR fixing the issue open during that time that the same dev ignored for 2 months.

I just tried it and the only ‘weird’ thing (and that I find annoying) is that the icons are not visible (probably because of the theme) and the text is not the same size (more noticeable in directory tree) and the icons of the folders are not visible, as you can see in attached screenshot:

I can't replicate:

And I compared it with the Aur package just in case there is a difference but there is none.

To cut a long story short, in its default configuration, Flatpak ‘devours’ the user's partition storage, unbeknownst to the user. To make matters worse, changing this behaviour is not trivial.

Yeah I've ran into that issue with flatpak, I moved to AM and I have 42 appimages and portable apps that use 1.9 GiB of disk storage, which iirc the gnome runtime in flatpak alone is +2 GiB for comparison.

[Perkolator]

To cut a long story short, in its default configuration, Flatpak ‘devours’ the user's partition storage, without the user's knowledge.

I have never had that problem. And this is the first time I have even heard someone say something like this. EDIT: I just counted, I have 42 Flatpak packages installed. Sounds to me like some program actually did that, not Flatpak itself. I have an example, Audacity (used as AppImage) ate all my space (wrote so big temp files) and I was probably very close to a crash. Without any proper examples I find it hard to believe you. Unless your free space is something like 5 GB.

[RafaelLinux]

I can't replicate:

And I compared it with the Aur package just in case there is a difference but there is none.

I forgot I'm using Wayland. So the text issue could be in Wayland only, not sure.
The icons issue could be related to the choosed one. I'll try to change theme settings to see if that is the problem.

Yeah I've ran into that issue with flatpak, I moved to AM and I have 42 appimages and portable apps that use 1.9 GiB of disk storage, which iirc the gnome runtime in flatpak alone is +2 GiB for comparison.

I have a lot of AppImages too, running is a distinct partition and SHARED in my intranet. You could not do that with Flatpak so easily (if possible).

[RafaelLinux]

I have never had that problem. And this is the first time I have even heard someone say something like this. EDIT: I just counted, I have 42 Flatpak packages installed. Sounds to me like some program actually did that, not Flatpak itself. I have an example, Audacity (used as AppImage) ate all my space (wrote so big temp files) and I was probably very close to a crash. Without any proper examples I find it hard to believe you. Unless your free space is something like 5 GB.

I am glad then to make you aware of the problem. I have confirmed this on other forums with users who have also noticed the problem. If you have not been aware of it, then you are not backing up your user partition (like most users in general). Then you would have been aware of the problem.

However, with AppImages you can have your downloaded applications perfectly isolated on another partition, controlled and what is even better, copy the entire folder with the AppImages to a USB stick and take them to another computer or have them available again without having to install anything in case you need them. Absolutely all advantages.

[Perkolator]

I am glad then to make you aware of the problem.

Well, you didn't. I haven't see any proof of what you claim. It's FUD to me. If you're backing up your partition, why on earth are you including some programs and caches? That's just stupid. Anyways, I'm out, I have better things to do than this.

[dannn-o]

I have to say - I encountered so many frustrations with Puddletag and trying to get support that I moved away from using it in favor of other apps (like Kid3 and Mp3tag). However, in an effort to help you with testing, I downloaded the puddletag-AppImage from your Github repo and tried executing it. However, I encountered this error:
./puddletag-appimage.sh: line 6: python: command not found

With my distro (Linux Mint), I normally have to specifically designate "python3" when invoked from the terminal (i.e. Bash). I didn't want to make any assumptions or try changing the code in your script, so am letting you know in case it needs to be made more flexible for different Python versions / installations.

[Samueru-sama]

However, I encountered this error: ./puddletag-appimage.sh: line 6: python: command not found

That error is from the script that makes the appimage.

The AppImage itself is on the releases so try that one and let me know.

edit: If you want to use the script I guess just change all instances of python for python3, it may fail still though since you need some other dependencies to use the script.

[RafaelLinux]

I am glad then to make you aware of the problem.

Well, you didn't. I haven't see any proof of what you claim. It's FUD to me. If you're backing up your partition, why on earth are you including some programs and caches? That's just stupid. Anyways, I'm out, I have better things to do than this.

This character is really for study. He appears here just for having mentioned Flatpak, shows a total lack of knowledge about how backup tools work (it is clear from his mention of the cache and the temporary files folder) and really doesn't know how Flatpak applications work and their lack of transparency and configuration regarding how they manage user space, and he accuses me of FUD!!!!!

Mind-boggling

[RafaelLinux]

I checked in another PC. Tumbleweed version, Wayland but distinct theme.
The icons are visible and the size of the texts is homogeneous. However, it seems that the AppImage version ignores the decoration of tabs, radio buttons, etc. Even the distances between sections are different. I guess it's a packaging thing, I really don't have that much knowledge of the formatting.

In these screenshots, on the left, AppImage version. At the bottom of the screenshots, I show the theme I have selected and you can see that it does apply the theme in the RPM packaged version of Puddletag (I indicate it with an arrow).

[dannn-o]

The AppImage itself is on the releases so try that one and let me know.

Sorry I missed that (Releases vs Code). I downloaded the AppImage and gave it a test run - looks pretty good to me:

I appreciate you putting this together - I just recently completed a clean-up of my entire music library, so am in kind of a lull right now with ID3 tag editing. But, I'll try to work Puddletag back in to my toolkit and use it moving forward.

One small suggestion: incorporate the version built into the AppImage name. I changed it after download from
puddletag-unknown-x86_64.AppImage to puddletag-2.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

[Samueru-sama]

One small suggestion: incorporate the version built into the AppImage name. I changed it after download from
puddletag-unknown-x86_64.AppImage to puddletag-2.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

Thanks, I'm aware of that problem, puddletag crashes when I try to get its version, so the script has a fallback to unknown, this sometimes happens with graphical apps when there is no display available even though the app will just print info to the terminal in this case.

Will see what I can come up with.

In these screenshots, on the left, AppImage version. At the bottom of the screenshots, I show the theme I have selected and you can see that it does apply the theme in the RPM packaged version of Puddletag (I indicate it with an arrow).

I think in this case theming is handled by something other than qt5ct which is the only thing that the appimage supports.

[Samueru-sama]

One small suggestion: incorporate the version built into the AppImage name. I changed it after download from
puddletag-unknown-x86_64.AppImage to puddletag-2.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

fixed