> On Feb 17, 2026, at 23:24, Martin Gysel via subsurface
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 17/02/2026 21:04, Martin Gysel via subsurface wrote:
> > > are old distros really a problem given the fact that subsurface gets
> > > distributed as AppImage in which all deps could be bundled?
> >
> > This is kind of a 'chicken and egg' thing - the AppImage is built by
> > installing Subsurface into an old distro, and then scraping and
> > packaging all of the dependencies into the AppImage binary. And
> > typically it will run on anything that is as old as the distro used
> > during the build, or newer.
> >
> > So with sufficient support for Qt6 not available in anything older than
> > 24.10, the AppImage will be very limited in where it can run on.
>
> I don't think so. The AppImage only provides a basic runtime [1] (type2 is
> based in apline linux). As long as the used libraries run on that runtime,
> everything is OK (because the runtime itself is designed to run on older
> systems). AFAIK ,as an example, the provided pre-compiled Qt libraries from
> Qt.io should run just fine on that runtime.
Yes, we can bundle a current set of Qt libraries with an AppImage. But from
what I can see
the AppImage has a lot of issues accessing devices and has lately given a
pretty poor user
experience.
We will have to completely change the way we create the AppImage to make that
happen,
but then again, we also had to completely change the way we are building the
Windows
executable...
All of this is one of those "time, I need more time!!!" issues.
So if you, Martin, or anyone else feels motivated to work on our tooling to
create a better
Qt6 based AppImage, all of this is done with the files in the .github directory
in the sources,
so anyone can help improve those
/D
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