 I have come to the conclusion that my Linux installation is very bloated. I have way too many packages installed on my Arco Linux installation. And part of the reason is that I do this YouTube channel and I test so much software and I have so many window managers especially installed. Most of these window managers are written in their own programming languages. I mean, I have Xmode and which is written in Haskell. So I have to have Haskell installed on the system. I have Qtile written in Python so I have to have Python on the system. I have Awesome which uses Lua so I have to have Lua installed on the system, etc, etc. So I had like 1900 packages installed on my system when I checked a few days ago. And I wanted a way to clean that up. I didn't want to have so many packages installed on my system because I was getting updates every day and sometimes I would have 200 packages to update almost every day because I had so much stuff installed so I've got so many packages needing to be updated all the time and there's always the potential for breakage when you're updating that many packages. And I was like, let me clean some of this stuff up. So I wanted to delete all the programs that I really didn't use because there was some stuff installed on the system that I didn't use. But one of the things that I was thinking about was you guys know I've been promoting app images quite heavily on the channel for a couple of months now. I've got some app images on my system but I was like, I wonder if I could convert a lot of the programs I use on a daily basis over to the app image format and then not have to worry about those programs being installed through the standard arch repositories or the arch user repositories, the AUR. And that way I don't have as many programs needing to be updated all the time. I think it would make my system more stable and it would definitely make my system a lot less bloated. So a couple of days ago what I started doing is I went to appimagehub.com which is a website where they tried to collect as many app images as possible to let you guys know about all these wonderful programs that are available as an app image if you want them. And I started downloading some of them and I started replacing some of my standard applications that I use on a daily basis that I had installed through the arch repositories. I started removing those and instead trying to use the app images. I found the app images to work quite well. So I went to the internet category and the first thing I did is I went to the browser category because I have like five, six, maybe seven browsers installed on my system. I wanted to see if any of those browsers that I use are packaged as an app image. And two of the ones that I use often were packaged as app images, Firefox and the Brave browser. For those of you that like Chromium based browsers, Brave is Chromium based, but there's also, I think Chromium is in here, Un-Google Chromium is in here. Waterfox is also in here for those of you wanting a Firefox based browser. Beaker browser, Falcon was in here. So they had some stuff. I was a little disappointed that Kube browser hasn't been packaged as an app image. That's another one that I use on a regular basis. But for the most part, a lot of the big browsers that people commonly use on Linux are available. Some other internet stuff here, the chat and messaging category. I do keep Discord around because sometimes people ask me to meet them on Discord for interviews or what have you. I also installed Element, which is a free and open source alternative to something like Discord. It's really great. It's a matrix client. There was a email category under internet and I did grab Thunderbird. And I grabbed GIMP from the graphics category. So there is an app image for GIMP. There's an app image for Kaden live in the video category games. There's several games that I do play on a regular basis free and open source games that are packaged as app images. Zero AD was there. Zenotic was also packaged as an app image. LibreOffice is packaged as an app image as well. LibreOffice Fresh, LibreOffice Stale, all the LibreOffices are there. Under the programming category, you did have some text editors and IDEs. I know Notepad QQ was there. I grabbed that. I think Genie is also packaged as an app image. The OVM is actually packaged as an app image. I don't think I grabbed that one, but I probably should see if I can get that to work for me. So if I go to my desktop here and let me launch my graphical file manager PCManFM, if I go into my home directory slash applications with a capital A, this is typically where you need to put your app images. And I have the app image launcher also installed. I did a video about the app image launcher a few weeks ago. Check that out if you haven't. But what you do is you grab these app images, you download them from app image hub or wherever you get your app images, put them in the applications directory and your home users directory. And then when you start, for example, the Brave browser, right click on it and run it with the app image launcher. This will create a .desktop file for this Brave app image. So those of you using traditional desktop environments with traditional menu systems, you should now have an entry for the Brave browser. I don't use any of those traditional desktop environments or menu systems. So this creates a .desktop file, but it really doesn't do much for me because I use the standard run prompts in Xmonad. I also use dmenu and by default, neither one of those actually reads the .desktop files. But there's the Brave browser. So launch is just fine and run is just fine. Some of the other ones I had in here had the app outlet, Belina etcher, edxui, Flameshot, moviemonad, which is a video player written in Haskell. That's nice to, if you want to use it to use it as an app image, that way you don't have to install hundreds of Haskell dependencies. Now, of course, for me, it doesn't matter because I already have Haskell installed because I have Xmonad and Pandoc installed on my system. But many people, of course, don't use Xmonad or Pandoc. So you already don't have Haskell installed. There's no reason to install, you know, just massive amounts of dependencies just for one video player. So I've taken the time to replace, like my Firefox and my Thunderbird, GIMP. I've replaced a few of my programs, VLC, which has some dependencies as well. And, you know, when I ran NeoFetch a few days ago, when I first started this process of replacing as much as I could with app images, I was over 1,900 packages. I was close to 2,000 packages installed on my system. And simply by downloading these app images and then removing the programs that I no longer needed on my system, I'm already down to 1,600 packages. And I guarantee you, I could probably lose another three or 400 packages here because I've only gone through about half the list of app images that I've installed. For example, CadenLive, I've downloaded the app image, I still have CadenLive installed from the repositories as well because I'm not sure if the app image is going to work correctly or not. This will be the first video that I will try to edit with the CadenLive app image. But assuming it works, then I will remove CadenLive and all its dependencies as they were installed from the traditional Arch repository. For me, because I do have to have so much software installed on my system, because I often play with various terminal emulators and various window managers and things like that. I probably won't ever get this thing down below about 1,200 packages installed. But for most of you guys, most of you guys only have one window manager installed. You just have a handful of programs that you use on a daily basis. And if you guys start replacing a lot of your stuff with app images, I guarantee you can get your number of packages installed from the repositories down to well under 1,000. I bet you could get it down to 600, 700 packages even. Now the one tricky thing with app images is by default, they don't create .desktop files unless you use something like the app launcher to launch them. But even after you use app launcher and you create the .desktop files, if you use tiling window managers or any standalone window manager, chances are you probably use dmenu as a run launcher. dmenu does not search the .desktop files. It searches in user slash bin for binaries on the system. That's all dmenu by default shows. So if I actually do a dmenu underscore run here, you guys are not going to see this. Let me open a terminal here. I was on the wrong monitor. But let me do dmenu underscore run. And this is dmenu. And if I start searching for Firefox, it's not there. It cannot find Firefox because it only exists on my system as an app image in my home directory slash applications. Or it is in .local slash share slash applications as a .desktop file. Dmenu doesn't know any of those exist. It only knows about user bin. So what I would have to do is if I want to use these app images with dmenu, well, there are some options. I could place the binaries in user bin or I could do some sim linking. I could sim link all of my app images in the applications directory over to user bin. That's a little clunky though. What you could do though is use a fork of dmenu called J4. I think it's J4 dmenu desktop. And this is actually in the arch user repository. So install j4-dmenu-desktop. And this version of dmenu can actually search the .desktop files and it actually finds Firefox this time. The Firefox app image that I had installed and it launches just fine. Of course, if I really wanted to get creative here, I'm going to CD into my .dmenu directory here. This is just a hidden directory I have in my home folder that has some quick and dirty dmenu scripts. And I created this one here dmenu-appimages-sh. And I create this array here. And this array is me simply doing an ls in my slash applications directory in my home directory. So ls is basically just going to print out the names of those app images in that directory. And what it does is it pipes that information into dmenu. And when I click one, it executes my choice. So let me quit out of that. And to see this in action, let me just run this dmenu-app-images script here. And you see it just lists everything that's in that applications directory. And if I pick one of these, such as the gimp here, it will actually run it just fine. Now I am not sure if this is really the way I want to go. The only problem I have with app images is being such a hardcore dmenu user. And in Xmonad, I use the Xmonad prompts. The Xmonad prompts also don't search the .desktop files. They just know about user bin. I'm going to have to come up with a better way to manage searching for applications on my system, especially if I start replacing a lot of stuff with app images. I was actually over at the Suclis website, the Suclis.org website. And I looked for dmenu patches to see if there was a patch for dmenu that would automatically search for the .desktop files on the system. It didn't appear to be one, but there are several forks of dmenu out there that do search the .desktop files. Two of the most popular ones are that J4 dmenu desktop application that I showed you. And there's also one that's, I think, just called i3 dmenu that was patched mainly for i3 users, but it does search the .desktop applications on your system. Now maybe I'm going overboard a little bit trying to replace all of my applications with all these app images, but I do think it helps debloat the system a little bit. And I really think, for those of you that are using source-based distributions, maybe you're using Slackware or Gen2 or NixOS or something like that, then I think app images really make sense because no longer do you have to wait for these very long compilation times for building your software from source, now you're just replacing a lot of the, especially the big, heavy programs with app images because nobody wants to wait for LibreOffice to compile or Firefox to compile or anything like that. Those take a long time. As a matter of fact, they take so long that I know in the past when I've installed Gen2, you can actually find binaries of some of the really big stuff like Firefox and LibreOffice. They actually will package them up as binaries because they know no one wants to wait hours for those particular programs to compile and literally they do take hours. I know I'm going to get trashed in the comments for using app images to debloat my system because so many of you guys think app images are actually bloat themselves. I disagree and I've told you guys in the past, if I ever created my own operating system or my own custom Linux distribution, it would be heavily focused around app images and this is kind of the start of something like that. I'm not planning on making my own operating system or anything, but at least for my installation here on my main production machine, I'm just trying to see if it works. And so far, I'm able to replace a lot of the tools I use on a regular basis. Like my web browser and my email client. There's no reason to have those installed from the repository. Now the one thing you do have to take into account is updating these app images. So you need to make sure, especially with the web browser, you know, you want to keep that up to date for security purposes, but a lot of your applications don't need to be updated all the time. As a matter of fact, that's one of the big reasons why people use the app image for something like Kaden live. The video editor is because the update may break the video editor. It seems like every other version of Kaden live is buggy, but with the app image, you don't have to update. Or if you do update, you can still keep the old version of Kaden live and the new version. You can have both app images on the system. That way if one doesn't work for you, you can use the other one. And of course app images makes cleaning up your system so much easier because when you're done with these app images, if you want them uninstalled, you have one file to delete and it's done. You've deleted the program. You've deleted the dependencies. I just think it makes a ton of sense and I wish more people gave app image a chance. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Devon Fran, Gabe Corbinian Mitchell, Akami Arch 5530, Chris Chuck, David, the other David Donnie, Dylan Gregory, Lewis Paul, Pic Veeam, Scott and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without those guys. This episode about app images helping fight system bloat, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. Look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys. Peace. Wonder if there's an app image for Emacs.