While .deb packages and tarballs are still the primary packaging formats in Ubuntu, appimage is growing increasingly popular these days. An appimage provides a compressed image that works on multiple distros. Rather than installing the program and storing files all over the system, appimages can be run by making this single portable file executable. This makes appimages a universal file packaging format that is very convenient for the end-user. Using AppImages On Ubuntu As stated, programs can be run with a single appimage file. This is possible because all the necessary dependencies are either included in the appimage or already present on the base system. To run the program, all you need to do is make the appimage executable. You can do this with the chmod command. chmod a+x filename.AppImage Or, you can change the permissions graphically. Right-click the appimage and select Properties. Then, enable the Allow executing file as program option from the Permissions tab. Now, you can simply double-click the appimage to run, or you can launch it from the terminal like so ./filename.AppImage What If the AppImage Doesn’t Work AppImages are packaged with the expectation that FUSE is already setup on the system. However, Ubuntu 22.04 and later no longer ship with the libfuse2 package. Due to this, when you attempt to run the appimage, it’ll have no effect. If you’re facing this issue, you can easily fix it by manually installing the libfuse2 package. sudo apt install libfuse2 Installing the AppImageLauncher While AppImages are highly convenient in terms of initial setup and portability, they’re lacking in some other ways (updating, desktop icons, and just system integration in general). The AppImageLauncher is the best solution for such shortcomings. It’s entirely optional, but if you deal with appimages often, we highly recommend installing this as it makes managing appimages much easier. To do this, add the PPA, update your package index, and install the launcher. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:appimagelauncher-team/stable sudo apt update sudo apt install appimagelauncher