 I'm a big fan of app images. You guys know that I love app images. Actually, I love snaps and flat packs as well. I use all three package formats. And if I open my graphical file manager here and I go into my home directory slash applications with a capital A, this is the directory you typically store your app images. You can see I've downloaded a number of app images here on my system applications that either work better for me as an app image or I keep an app image around because I want a specific version of that particular program or maybe the application isn't in my distributions repositories. And the only way I can get that program is with an app image. And one of the things with app images is such a really neat package format, but a drawback to it is there's no real command line manager, package manager, command line install program or anything like that. So there are some helper programs out there. But recently I came across this here, the AM application manager. Actually, I've been following this for a number of months now. I've actually had it installed on my system at least probably six months or so. And I've been pretty impressed with it and it keeps getting better. Matter of fact, the creator of the AM application manager actually posted on my distro tube subreddit a few days ago to let me know about the application manager AM. And to remind me that, you know, really, I should actually do a video about it. He's actually got a great video on his GitHub about it, little demonstration. It's basically a quick walkthrough. There's no talking or anything. There's some like heavy metal music in the background, but it's actually a really nice demonstration. But one of the things about AM is that it downloads and installs your app images. It puts them in the appropriate directories. So it typically is going to put the source files themselves and slash up, which is typically where third party packages tend to go on a Linux system. If you're installing something or building something from source, for example, where do you typically put it? You'll put it in slash up. That's typically what I do, for example, like when I'm building suckless software and things like that, I'll throw it in slash up. So that's where the AM package manager will default to putting the source files for these app images, but it will also create a dot desktop file and put that in user share applications. That's very important that it creates the dot desktop file for you. That means the app image will actually show up in your menu system. So things like D menu and row fee or if your menu system of your desktop environment like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, things like that. So that is really neat that it does that, but it goes a step further. It also creates a link and puts the link in user local bin. And that's really important, especially for D menu users, because D menu actually does not read the desktop files. How does D menu know what to search for when I run D menu? Well it searches for all the binaries on the system. So everything in user bin or user local bin, the path, basically your shell's path. So having that link in one of those bin directories that are part of the path means that these app images now will show up in D menu. So let me show you AM in action. I've already got it installed on my system, so let me switch to a new workspace here and I'm going to open a terminal and I'll zoom in a little bit. If I do AM and I'll do dash H for help, dash H is typically the flag most programs will use for displaying help information. I'm going to scroll up here since I zoomed in, I've got to scroll up pretty good ways. You can see there is a few flags and options with AM. There's a good 15 or 20 flags and options you can use. The most useful ones, at least the ones I use all the time, I will do AM dash L. That is a list that just spits out all of the available app images that you can install. Now it spits out, you can see 1700 and 76 packages. Right now I've got two that I've actually installed via AM. Now most of my app images that I showed you earlier, I just downloaded myself. I didn't actually install them via AM, but I could eventually maybe replace all of those app images and have them managed by AM. And right now I'm the only two packages that are installed via AM or AM itself and I think one other dependency that AM needed. Now it's very hard to navigate a list of 1700 and 76 packages. So typically what I would do is I would probably pipe AM dash L into something like LIS. That way you can just hit enter and just go down and just read the list or whatever you want. They also have this flag here dash Q for query and you could search for some string, for example Chromium I would assume would be available yet and I knew it would be available because I know on Google Chromium I actually have the app image for on Google Chromium I believe stored somewhere and then you have Chromium itself as well and then you also have Brave which is available as an app image and the reason it came up for that search term is because Chromium is part of its description because it's based on Chromium. So let me actually install something. So I've picked out a couple of programs here that I think one of them I know I've talked about in the past and that is Potter which is a podcasting client that's PODDR. It's an electron app, pretty neat little app if you need a good podcast client for your Linux desktop. I'm going to go ahead and launch it from the terminal especially the very first time I like launching these from the terminal just in case there's an error because some of these app images actually won't work. I've actually installed a number of app images or downloaded a number of app images that just didn't quite work correctly and sometimes it's nice to actually see the error messages in the terminal. So the very first time I actually want to launch it from the terminal just in case it doesn't work. I bet it looks like it's going to work just fine since the audio couldn't be loaded. The very first time I ran it though I don't know what audio it would have been trying to load here so I think that was alright. But this is Potter, really nice little application. I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to install an extra term, nothing really special with it. It's just a terminal emulator. If you've seen one terminal emulator you've seen them all. Why is this not giving me my prompt back? That is weird. My prompt went away. I may have to relaunch the terminal. No, it's working. So this is extra term. So I'm getting a tip here. It's kind of annoying. I'm basically giving you a little tip of how extra term works. It looks like it put us in the directory where AM was installing the app image source file. So that's kind of neat. Let me close that and get back to my terminal here. You want to search for updates. You could do AM-U and it will say it'll take several minutes but it's looking for updates for extra term and Potter and it shouldn't find any, right? Because we installed them like five minutes ago, maybe not even that long. So it looks like everything is up to date. Now one really neat piece of functionality that I love with AM is it allows you to actually save a backup of a current working version of a particular app image. And that is done with AM-B and let's do this for extra term. Say I install extra term and it's working beautifully and I don't want an eventual update to a new version that could potentially be buggy or completely broken to ruin my extra term, right? And this is not an app image problem. This is just software in general. As you go from one version of a piece of software to the next and it's buggy or it's completely broken and you have to fall back to the previous working version. So let's make a backup. So for example, in my workflow, I depend on programs like Caden Live and I use them on a daily basis. So it's nice to have a backup to fall back to in case the next version of those programs are broken in some way. So I'm going to do AM-B extra term. Just going to ask, do I wish to back up the current version of extra term? Why for yes? And you can see it saved that snapshot. And to restore to a previous version, let's imagine that I just did an update. Extra term had an update and the new version is broken. Well, I can do AM-O extra term and dash O is for overwrite because we're going to overwrite this current version of extra term with the old one with the backup. Why for yes? It says, please select a snapshot. There is only one snapshot. It says enter the name. There is no name. That's just a time and date stamp. I don't know if I could have given it a name previously when I made the backup. But since there's no name, I'm just going to hit enter because the name is empty. And it says restore completed successfully. So we rolled back to the previous version of extra term from that snapshot. Now there was no previous version. The snapshot and the current version of extra term were the same version, but you get the idea. Another useful flag you can do is AM-F for I think it's find or files. I think it's files. What it does is it shows you some of what is being managed by AM. So it shows you those programs that are currently being managed by the AM application manager. And of course, AM manages itself. It looks like it's also managing some of my app images from my home slash applications directory. I guess it is managing those, even though I didn't install those via AM. I guess it knows they exist because that is what is in here. For example, I have a discord app image that I keep around. I have a zoom app image I keep around. I don't typically use discord or zoom. I haven't used zoom probably in two years or more. I haven't logged into discord in at least a year or more, but I keep those around because sometimes people ask me to meet them on camera for whatever reason and they use those particular programs. For me, I prefer Jitsie these days. Also have some games as an app image. It looks like I have open arena as an app image. I have sour Broughton as an app image. Very cool, free and open source, first person shooters. So that is a very quick overview of the AM package manager. So AM, AM-H for help and get you the information about AM. Of course, go to the AM GitHub for more information. For those of you wondering, when you do the AM-L for listing all the available app images and it's like 1700 app images, where does it get that list? Well, they keep a list online. If you go to portable-linux-apps.github.io and I'll link that in the show description, you'll get this page, which is all of those applications that are available via AM. You go to applications list and here is a graphical table of all of those applications. And if you clicked on one, you can get more information right here on the web, including a screenshot. So basically, you can think of this as a GUI web front end to the AM applications manager. So that is the AM application manager. Fantastic little program, it's licensed under the GPL. So it is free and open source software. So guys, check it out. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Of course, I'm talking about Gabe James-Maxim, a homie's too bald, Matt Mimit, Mitchell Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragon, Bash Potato Chuck, Commander Angry, George Lee, Marshawn, Methods Nate, Earl, John Paul, peace heart, and for all polytech realities for less red-propit rolling tools, devil, Willie, Zenabit. Man, I ran out of breath there at the end, but these guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the AM application manager would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community, if you like my work. I want to see more videos about free and open-store software like AM. Subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.