Using AppImages

I run Debian on two of my Linux computers and CachyOS on another. CachyOS is based on Arch Linux. Debian is known for stability, but not for having cutting edge software, while Arch Linux is known for the opposite.

I am a big user of Obsidian. It is not in the Debian repositories, but it is in the Arch Linux repositories. Obsidian builds an AppImage of the program for installing it on a wide variety of distributions, so I use that on my Debian computers.

An AppImage can be simply downloaded anywhere on your disk and then have its permissions changed to make it executable. At this point it can be run by clicking on the file in a file manager or by using it’s full path name in a terminal, but it does not appear in the desktop environment’s menus, and in the case of Obsidian, I discovered that the Obsidian web clipper cannot call it.

There are programs available to add the AppImages to menus, but if you use only one or two, you may prefer to do by hand.

Xdg-desktop files describe applications so the desktop environments can find them. If the developer of the AppImage does not provide one you may have to write it yourself.

Create a file called application.desktop, where application the name of the application you want. It should be stored in /home/user/.local/share/applications, where you put in your username for user in the path. The desktop file I created for obsidian is below. I downloaded Obsidian-1.9.14.AppImage from the Obsidian site, and I keep my AppImages in /home/mike/AppImages.

\[Desktop Entry\]
Name=obsidian
Comment=Note taking and organization app
Exec=/home/mike/AppImages/Obsidian-1.9.14.AppImage
Icon=/home/mike/Icons/Obsidian.png
Terminal=false
Type=Office
Categories=Productivity
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/obsidian;

Now obsidian appears in the Gnome menus and the Obsidian web clipper works.

On CachyOS, I just installed obsidian with pacman and everything worked.