alt Hacker NewsThe author has obviously never tried Tauri on Linux. I've never seen one of their AppImages work correctly. Every project uses the upstream GitHub action to build binaries and it compiles dynamically linked binaries limited to the glibc from the Ubuntu 22 or 24 VM used. Xdg-open is often broken too from broken environment variables in the AppImages, so you can open a link in the default web browser. The entire build process needs reworked.
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I've been a lifelong Linux user, and this makes me sad.
I don't know enough to comment about whether or not it's necessary, but any time I've tried to get anything working that wasn't updated recently, it was impossible.
Well impossible is a bit strong, the process ranges from:
- Find a forum post that links to some old .deb files and install them manually
- Install a newer version of a dependency and then recompile from source code, after spending an hour or two updating the program so it works with the new version of the dependency because the dependency changed its API for no reason (that one's not a Linux problem per se, but it wouldn't be necessary if the old one still worked!)
Better to download the Windows version and run it in WINE...
Sadly, every time that one guy posts his personal finance app on HN I try it and every time tauri gives me trouble to build, and when I fix whatever build errors it gives me it basically opens up a blank window and the app doesn't work (He now offers a Docker image which I can't help but feel is related to these difficulties).
Recently I tried Electron app, it didn't work out of the box in Ubuntu 24.04 (AppImage). Turned out some issue with apparmor. It worked if extracted manually, though, but that's a bit of friction for ordinary users, also probably wouldn't work with updater.
I think that's the issue: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/41066
Not even sure who to blame in this situation.
Using `zig-cc (clang)` to set a particular `LibC` version is one of the best decisions i have made, and saved me from those meaningless libC mismatch errors!
I really wanted to use tauri instead of electron, but the libwebkit it uses on linux is just too slow for modern CSS/html, from memory I managed to get single digit fps just scrolling the components page of daisy-ui. I am holding on for when they get a servo integration.
The idea of AppImages is neat, but the implementation is awful and rarely works (except perhaps on Ubuntu and Fedora and extremely similar scenarios).
The main issue being that they're dynamically linked binaries, which is exactly what you want to avoid for their use case.
Using packages from your favourite distribution is usually your best bet.
lol Linux. The market share is laughably small vs the time and energy and cost it’d take an engineer or team of engineers to support Linux. Sure they could bundle electron but where’s the fun in that?
It's like they always say: Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.