Just installed Manjaro KDE Plasma today after Deepin 20 totally let me down. One of my worry when switching to Manjaro is software availability (or lack thereof). Most pre-packaged softwares on Linux comes in either Debian flavor (.deb) or Red Hat flavor (.rpm), and Manjaro is well, neither. It’s Arch-based.

Luckily, its user repo is pretty massive. I was able to find almost everything I wanted on AUR (Arch User Repository), and pretty much everything is up-to-date, unlike Deepin’s shitty ‘App Store’. Proprietary software however, are harder to come by.

One of them is Bootstrap Studio.

I was super relieved however, to learn that the developer chose to release the linux binary as an AppImage as opposed to DEB or RPM. Which means it’s super convenient to work with.

Since it’s electron-based, it basically uses the same binaries for Windows, OS X and Linux. So if you wanted to, you can replace app.asar with the same file from another platform and it would just works™.

Why would you want to do that? Well if you’re here then chances are you already know why.

What you basically want to do is grab the AppImage, run it with the flag --appimage-extract, which will extract everything to a folder called squashfs-root. Just go in there, replace the file, then repack everything with the command appimagetool -v squashfs-root and you will have what you want.

Just don’t tell anybody about this, m’kay?

Grab install.sh from this Github and just run it.

It’s that simple, really. This is why the opensource community is great. The Figma team had failed to create a native Linux desktop app for over 2 years (which is still nothing compare to Google on their promise to launch a Google Drive client for Linux), and yet an unknown individual managed to do it in his/her spare time.

Why would you need a desktop app when Figma works in your browser, you ask? Here’s a hint: Native Font! I mean Figma did a great job integrating Google Fonts in their app (I figure that would be sufficient for 90% web-related design work). But any real designer would have to have their own font collection, and not being able to use it in their favorite design tool is just bad design.

Note: if for some reason the install script fails, you can always download a premade AppImage for Figma from the same Github

Okay so this is pretty much a journal of how I managed to get Maya to run for the first time on one my my Linux boxes.

As you may have know, Autodesk is one of the major names in the graphic and VFX industry, with their line-up of industry standard softwares like 3DS Max, Maya etc.

Unfortunately, for some reasons they still couldn’t hire a capable engineer who could create a half decent installer package for the Linux platform. Maya is the only software in their lineup that is still currently being maintained for Linux, and even then it’s still using old packaging techniques from 20 years ago, made for RPM-based Linux distros (which made sense at the time since professional Linux distros are mostly RPM-based, Red Hat, CentOS, etc.). But 20 years later, with the rise of Ubuntu and its DEB-based variants, the RPM distros now hold only a fraction of the market share. And yet, for some reason, official Maya installer is still created with RPM in mind. I reckon it’s either they couldn’t afford a capable engineer, or the guy who’s responsible for maintaining Linux installers is too old to learn new technologies (as an old guy working in the tech industry myself, I deeply sympathize).

Read More