 Yesterday, I made a video talking about how much I love app images and why I think app images have some real advantages over other universal packaging formats like Snaps and Flatpacks. Now, app images do differ a lot from Snaps and Flatpacks. One of the big difference, and people mentioned this in the comments of yesterday's video, I heard this a lot, is that there's no package manager built around app images, therefore, you have no way to update your app images. And I understand that because with Snaps and Flatpacks, they have package managers that get shipped with these things, right, for Snaps. You just open a terminal and type snap install program snap remove program snap update, right? Same thing with Flatpacks. Flatpacks install, Flatpacks remove, Flatpacks update. You don't really have that with app image, but it's the free and open source software community. If we have a problem, people tend to write things to solve this problem, and with updating your app images, this problem has kind of been solved. If I switch over to my desktop. Here's the GitHub page for app image update. App image update is a graphical program that when you select it, when you open it, all you get is a file picker where you go and find the app image that you want to update. That's all it does. So all you need to do is go into releases here, and I'm going to choose, well, I'll choose the continuous build, I'm assuming that's a daily build, and I'm going to download the latest app image, and it needs to go in your home directory slash applications with a capital A. That's where all app images should go on your system. Now I've already installed this, so I'll decline downloading it again, and then I'm going to open a file manager, and I'm going to go into applications. And the very first time you run the app image update tool, which you want to do, make sure you run it with the app image launcher. So a desktop entry file gets created, so it appears in all your menus, and it also will do a CH mod for you and make this executable for you. That way you don't have to do it yourself, right? So right click on it the very first time you run it, and choose to run it with the app image launcher. And this is app image update. All it is is a file picker is going to ask, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to update? I'm going to drag my applications menu actually over here into the bookmarks of the file picker, because every time you open this program, this will be the folder you want to go to. So just make a handy little bookmark here for it. Go into applications, and pick a program to update. Maybe I want to update Bolina etcher. I don't know if it has an updater available or not. One thing about app images you need to know is that app images, they're only updatable if the developer made the app image updatable. Meaning he had to do some special stuff. He had to do some settings creating the app image to make the app image updatable. If it's not updatable, you can't update it through a tool like this. You actually have to go and manually go download the newest package. So not every app image is updatable, but most are. And if you find an app image that isn't updatable, go and tell the developer to make his app image updatable. That way tools like this should work on most things. So I'm going to choose Bolina etcher and choose open. And you see the app image update tool says update field. And that actually tells you the reason Bolina etcher's update field is because this is one of those packages that doesn't have any kind of settings. There's no information how to update this particular program. It says please contact the author of this app image and ask them to embed update information. So that is why that fails. Now some responsible developers do include update information for their app image. For example, this version of Discord, Discord gets updated all the time. And I hardly ever use Discord. I have it around just in case people ask me to join them on Discord. I haven't been in Discord in a while. So I'm assuming there's probably an update available for it. So I'm going to open the app image update tool. And since I've already opened it with the app image launcher, I don't need to run it through the launcher again. And now I'm going to choose the Discord app image and click open. And that window is freezing up there. That is, oh, it took a minute to start. But it was downloading. I'm assuming Discord is a pretty big program. That was weird that it froze up. But I guess it had to download something there. But it definitely run an update, right? So we ran an update. If you click the dropdown, you can actually see some output here as far as the update. If I close that, now that is the new version of Discord we just updated to. Now, for some reason, the new version is broken. It doesn't get rid of the old version. You see, the old version is still here. And they tacked on dash old, right? Don't you know that was your previous version. That way, if the new version doesn't work, you can always go back to the previous. Now, one limitation to this particular tool, the app image update tool, let me run it one more time, is the fact that you can't update more than one app image at a time. So when the file picker opens, I can't select more than one. It always updates one at a time. You can't just select the entire applications directory and hit open, and it'd have it update all of your app images, which would be nice. I know some people are going to want that. For me, I don't mind the fact that it only does it one at a time because most of my app images are just, I don't want them updated unless I have a need to update them for some reason, like something is missing or broken or if I need a new feature. So that's not something me personally, I want, but I know a lot of people will want. Well, there is a command line tool that can update your app images for you. And that is the app image CLI tool. And if you go to the releases on the app image CLI tool page here on GitHub, choose the app image, obviously, save that to your applications directory. And then let me go back to PCMAN FM. I've got the app image CLI tool. Let's run it with the app image launcher, the very first time, integrate and run. And then let me go to a terminal, let me open a terminal, zoom way in, CD back into applications. There is app image CLI tool. And the way this particular tool works is I probably need to rename it. I have to type that very lengthy path. So I probably renamed that to something, you know, this is just three or four letters and probably make it an alias in my bash RC, but I could do app image CLI tool and then update and then name of program. For example, we know Discord, we just updated it. What else do I have that I'm pretty confident has an update element? Element, I know I haven't used that particular program in a long time. Let me move my head here. So we're gonna use app image CLI tool update element. And it should go and find if element has an update available and it does. It's gonna download stuff for eight minutes, 58 seconds. I'll control C to quit out of that to decline the update. I don't wanna wait on that, but that is how the CLI tool works. And the good thing with it is, I mean, you could do app image update. And let me move my head out of the way. I should have cleared the screen. You could do the app image dash CLI dash tool space update and then asterix dot app image, right? So do this command on every file that ends in dot app image. And it will work the same. It's gonna search each one. Many of them have no updates available. And it looks like it crapped out. Actually, it looks like it crapped out when it got to element, probably because I declined the update, but probably had I not stopped the element, right? Let me just remove element. I never really use it anyway. So I'm gonna remove element and rerun the command trying to update all the app images in this directory and see if it'll actually proceed. Now that I got rid of element, yeah. I see. The file that was a problem was a partial download. So it had a partial download of the latest element because app image, it never gets rid of the old files, right? Keeps the old files around just in case, but it was downloading a new one, but I canceled that download and that calls the CLI tool to crap out. But now it's working just fine. And it's going to update all of my app images. It looks like it's gonna take 10 minutes or so to download some of this stuff. So that is just a couple of tools that you can use to update your app images. I know a lot of people in the comments yesterday were crying about updates. And it's not like it's that hard. These kinds of tools are not that hard to make. So, I mean, think about it. Free and open source software, people have a problem, people are gonna solve it. All you had to do was do a quick Google search and you were gonna find tools out there available for you to help you update your system. I would use the app image update tool, the graphical one to update things one at a time. That's gonna solve the problem for most people. If you want the CLI tool, that is useful, especially if you want to do some scripting, some automation stuff, or if you want to do a mass update of a lot of app images, then you probably need the app image CLI tool on your system. I'm gonna link to both of these tools in the show description. Number four I go, I need to think of few special people. Devon Gabe James, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Alan, Armoredragon, Chuck, Manderangry, Diokai, Dylan, George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja, Max, Mike, Erion, Oleg, Andrew, Peace, Archon, Fedor, Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are the A's through K's. I wanna thank each and every one of those people as well as the L through Z's, right? These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without you guys, I couldn't do what I do. If you like my work and wanna help support me, go for Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. And if you got some programming skills, help these guys out with their tools.