Soaring through the future with Self-Contained Linux Packages

Packaging user-facing apps for Linux is a pain sometimes: we are no strangers to broken dependencies from installing random packages using commands from the internet. This is a very bad experience for new users, especially those who are new to Linux who are disappointed by the package management mess most of us have made.

What this means:

• For App Developers: Make it easier to support a larger Linux userbase.
• For Users: Download, Grant Permissions and Run. It's that simple. With soar, it's just one command and the app runs.

Container solutions and more promise to make your life easier but may not always deliver:

- Snap packages have been known to be bloated and usually show worse performance and experiences.

- Flatpak largely fixes it but it requires you to have flatpak installed and set up.

- Traditional AppImages are worse off, they are not truly universal and still rely on a lot of distro-specific stuff. for example, a lot of apps don't run out-of-the box on MUSL-based distros like Alpine Linux, NixOS, etc.

We solve all of these problems (to some extent) in this talk, while making the process of packaging Linux apps easier, along with the story of how I joined this community, about a frustrated student and a specific piece of software

This won't be a technical deep-dive into how soar or an AppImage works, rather a demonstration of these tools.

This talk will be focused on demonstrating "soar", QaidVoid's Package Manager to easily manage and run such apps, along with the PkgForge community's resources, and the SBUILD format for requesting new packages to be added.

I am a user of, and a package maintainer for the soar package for Pixelpulse2.