Darktable appimage?

Hello,

Is there any legit place to get an appimage of Darktable?
I would like to try out the latest version with 3D LUT support, but Darktable is one of my main tools for photography and I am not sure if leaving my self with unstable version would be a good decision. I thought if there was an appimage of DT stable I could use the unstable ppa to check on latest developments of DT and have an appimage of the stable version.
Alternatively I would also be happy to know if it is possible to install multiple versions of DT on Ubuntu 18.04.

Thanks for your help! :slight_smile:

I am not aware of any AppImages for darktable. Using the snap or the flatpak version would allow you to compile the unstable version and run it on your system.

Be aware the XMP format has changed from 2.6.x to 2.7, and is not backward compatible.

Alternatively, building 2.7 in the flatpak shouldn’t be too difficult, just change the package definition in the Jason file to point at git master.

I’d be happy to send a pull request that will automatically produce an AppImage if I can get Darktable to compile on the oldest still-supported LTS release of Ubuntu, which is xenial at this time.

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/2944

I believe GTK 3.22 is required. The version in Denial is too old, and thus won’t work. You could patch up whatever is needed to make it run using 3.18, but I get the feeling you’d have to do that on your own, as the team, which is quite small, can’t put time towards such an endeavor.

I appreciate your efforts as I use several appimages, but I’m not sure the time investment to support Xenial is worth it.

So, that’s why Appimage. If DT requires LibXYZ version 0.19.2 which is only available in 1-week old distros, it could be packed into Appimage. Having two versions on one system would give a benefit of testing changes between, also to people who photograph but don’t code. Compiling every time you reinstall, makes particular software too ephemeric to give it a real detailed try, for many users. And with DT version, (for example) 3.4.1.appimage all users would have the same system environment and lib set - consistent, proven to work with DT 3.4.1, without risk/guarantee of wrecking havoc in system.

That is what happened (was done) with Freecad, RawTherapee, GIMP, Digikam, slic3r and Prusa Slicer, SIRIL, HDRmerge, cura and many more. Now all this software became almost bulletproof compared to compiling separately on each user’s machine, and available to test, use and share experience. Without “it doesn’t compile on my ABC Linux 12.3” or “it wouldn’t work on my system because my other important software needs LibXYZ version 0.19.1”.

In some cases (for me FreeCAD and RT) appimage is few times smaller, a bit faster and less prone to crash than version provided in packages for my distro.

Althrough I use Linux since Slackware 8.1 or so, and compiled software “few” times, I find Appimages the best way to distribute apps nowadays.

  1. Isn’t it possible to compile (and make Appimage) for oldest […] ? Including needed libraries in appropriate versions? (asking, not complaining)
  2. is 4.5 years old version of Ubuntu enough reason to not provide appimage, suitable for all other distros and also 4 years old Ubintu? (again - asking, not complaining)
  3. who uses 16.4 on one/two years old PC? My 2 years old i5-8 with 8 Gigs of RAM is probably the slowest machine that makes sense to run DT on.