Hi-
I’m thinking about using an immutable distro on a new laptop coming my way. Am I better off using the Appimage or Flatpak? The laptop will have integrated graphics only (AMD CPU), so I don’t plan on using OpenCL unless it happens to be available. I do like to have access to darktable upgrades soon after release, if that’s a consideration.
Thanks,
The AppImage is now official and the binary should be ready when each release is announced. However, you have to follow development and download it eachc time.
The flakpak is not official and there is some trouble with running some lua plugins as far as I know because of flatpak’s sandbox. As a maintainer of the flatpak, I try and make sure it getrs updated pretty quickly. Flatpaks can be updated as part of your system.
I don’t think you can go wrong either way.
If you’re going with silverblue or RPM ostree based, then you’ll likely have flatpak installed and configured already.
Thanks, I’ll try each for a while and then decide. I think I had some issues with the Flatpak on my desktop system reaching a drive, Flatseal allowed me to fix it. The laptop shouldn’t have that issue.
Auto updating is good, but since I follow the news I usually know when to update. It seems the Appimage sticks the config files in the home directory, which saves me having to hunt them down in the flatpak, but that’s just me having memory issues. Thanks for helping make the Flatpak possible!
All flatpack application specific config files are stored in your home folder as well, but under ~/.var/app/appname .
For darktable, it’s ~/.var/app/org.darktable.Darktable/config/darktable/ instead of ~/.config/darktable.
Basically, always search in ~/.var/app/ there when dealing with flatpack 
I’ve tried out both the Flatpak and the App Image on my immutable distro, only problem I’ve had is that the lens correction module in the App Image throws an error message that the camera/lens is not found. Not sure if there is a fix for this, but good to know I have a choice of how to go. Thanks
Yeah they either need a step to checkout and transform the latest lensfun profiles or you can update the user location of the lensfun profiles yourself.
Thanks Mica-
I’m probably going with the flatpak for now. For my own knowledge, is the AppImage using a lensfun library supplied by Fedora and the distro packager?
It will uses it’s packaged lensfun unless it sees a user updated lensfun db, as far as I know.
That would surprise me, as the camera it couldn’t find is an older model that has been around since 2017. But it is what it is!