The original post: /r/linux by /u/frozencreed on 2024-12-20 04:17:32.

This is meant to take AppImage programs and turn them into regular apps that can be opened in the regular launcher and pinned to the dash like normal apps in Ubuntu 24.04. This should work with any AppImage program that can be normally run in Ubuntu 24.04.

I’m gonna get right to the point, I recently had to add Bambu Studio to my new Ubuntu Laptop (screw you Windows 11) and I was not impressed with the process. They only had an AppImage to download, and it took some extra steps to even get it to work (libfuse2, looking at you). Then I was left with this ugly icon that I had to run from a directory to get to work. Not the end of the world but it annoyed me for a few reasons:

  1. I couldn’t pin it to the dash, meaning it wasn’t as easy to access as I wanted
  2. It had the ugly settings cog icon, and wasn’t easy to find in a folder with other files.
  3. It looked ugly if I left it on my desktop.
  4. Did I mention it was ugly?

So I found a way to convert it into a regular app that can be launched from the menu and added an icon file of it to make it nicer to work with, and as a bonus, I can now pin it to my dash!

It took some troubleshooting, but after I got it working I realized that it should have been way easier to do this. It frustrated me to the point that I said screw it, and coded a script to automate the whole process, like pretty much completely hands off.

https://github.com/bl4ckj4ck777/install-appimage

I’m gonna try to keep this relatively short, but basically, download the zip, extract the files into a new folder, add your app image in there and an svg icon file (or just use the default one I included, I completely support laziness), and run the script as sudo. Then it will ask you a couple questions to make the app work correctly in Ubuntu (like what the name/description/category should be).

It will make all the directory and permission changes to make it executable, etc, automatically so you don’t have to do anything other than run the script.

There’s probably already something like this out there, I’m not under any illusions that there aren’t. I honestly don’t care if there is, I just wanted something to do this afternoon, and after I finished it, I decided to upload it to github and make it open source.

Anyway, if you try it, let me know if it works for you and your setup and if it doesn’t, then make an issue, that’s what github is for right?