I admit that there is an element of, "but I chose an obscure and challenging linux variant, waaah why isn't it supported" here, but (a) there's currently no flatpak and (b) when, for goodness sakes, will major linux projects begin packaging for Nix/NixOS as a matter of course? It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

Another way to approach this would be to advocate Nix as the build system for Flatpak or AppImage. Don't know what the status is of nix-bundle, but if it is possible to turn a Nix package into an AppImage with little extra work that would be ideal. Source: over 3 years ago

Somewhat related, I wanted to mention nix-bundler it allows to wrap an application with nix into a single file. Source: over 3 years ago

Nix itself is more focused on "distribute from this host with nix, to this other host with nix". Though, here is e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle, which is supported as an experimental command in nix 2.4. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

I believe this tool does: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle. Source: over 3 years ago

The equivalent of "Windows portable apps" on Linux isn't flatpaks (these add a bunch of extra stuff and need some sort of support from the OS) but AppImages[0]. AppImages are still not 100% the same (and can never be as Windows applications can rely on A LOT more stuff to be there than Linux desktop apps) but functionally/UX-wise they're the closest: you download some program, chmod +x it and run it like... - Source: Hacker News / 23 days ago

Exciting. I'd love to see AppImage [0] builds of applications produced with this library. [0] https://appimage.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

Like again if you are not sure, what open source means, this is open source: https://appimage.org/ Hope it is abundantly clear with this example. Docker tried it's best to do the whole open source but business first and it led to disastrous results. At best this will make your company suffer and second guess itself and at worst this is moral fraud. Talk to your group partner about this and explain to them as well. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since I prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years. [0] https://appimage.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago