Introducing: NX AppHub — App Management for Nitrux

Over the past month, we’ve cleaned up the distribution, removing zap, an unmaintained CLI package management interface for AppImages, and the NX Software Center, our GUI for managing AppImages. This leaves the door open for better tools to be included in the distribution.

We’re excited to introduce NX AppHub, a system to provide applications for Nitrux, particularly the CLI component, its central repository, and its integration daemon.

Today’s news post will tell you how NX AppHub started, why we created it, and where you can get it. Let’s go!

Background

The history of NX AppHub goes back to January 2024, when we announced an initiative we started called NX AppImage Build Hub. In this initiative, we set out to fork the repositories that were part of the defunct AppRepo.de—a website that provided hundreds of AppImages with their build scripts hosted on GitHub—and then complete the original goal of their creator of building the AppImages using GitHub Actions while also uploading these AppImages to another third-party website and the only source that the NX Software Center used to fetch AppImages, AppImageHub.com.

As I mentioned in that entry, the idea was that we would provide the AppImages ourselves and provide up-to-date content in our application. A major issue users had with the NX Software Center was the reliability of these applications because we did not provide them. They were often outdated or didn’t work, and in general, many people mistrust AppImages because “they’re downloaded from a random website.”

We intended to finalize this work by October 2024, in time to present it at the Linux App Summit, held in Monterrey, Mexico, which would be the best opportunity to showcase this effort. Alas, a couple of months later, we could not continue working on this endeavor as we had a workforce shortage.

Nonetheless, this setback was an opportunity in disguise to develop a better solution. So, on the 24th of September, 2024, work started on NX Applications Hub, the original name of the initial implementation of NX AppHub, which was announced and presented on the 5th of October, 2024, during the Linux App Summit 2024, which you can watch below.

This implementation was based on our tutorial, Making an AppImage in Nitrux, which shows how to use appimage-builder and a Distrobox container to create an AppImage. So, NX Applications Hub was created as a fully automated version of that tutorial.

In summary, using Distrobox containers and appimage-builder, NX Applications Hub allowed application generation locally without relying on external CI configurations.

However, this implementation, while functional, ended up being too complex.

After a round of introspection, I found a couple of showstoppers with appimage-builder: first, that it was unmaintained, and second, that it couldn’t produce an AppImage from packages that had implemented Usrmerge, so any AppImage would’ve been made from software that was “stable” but inherently too old because it only pulled packages from Debian stable.

The choice was evident to me: appimage-builder would not serve our purposes. And as fine as they are on their own, including containers increasingly felt like overkill as part of the process for what we wanted to achieve. A few months later, and having time after working in other recently presented projects, it was time to work on NX Applications Hub again.

But not before watching some videos by other people using the distribution did I learn that the API endpoint in AppImageHub.com that the NX Software Center had been using for a very long time had stopped working. This caused severe problems in our application and the bad opinion of the users who tried the distribution and opened the application.

That was the second occurrence that happened to us, with AppRepo shutting down being the first, causing the same perception issues. The NX Software Center code’s lack of maintenance certainly didn’t help. Although it wasn’t broken, it was lagging behind other MauiKit applications. All this led me to decide it had been enough. I did a hard reset with NX Applications Hub, with the first order of the day being to shorten the name.

The goal was clear: It needed to be easy to make and maintain, minimal, focused, and purpose-built, and it should not need to rely on any third-party API to provide applications.

As I mentioned, NX AppHub is a system, not a single utility. It comprises the following components, which we’ll discuss below in detail.

• NX AppHub CLI
• NX AppHub Apps
• NX AppHub Daemon
• NX AppHub GUI
  • ⚠️ Important: Built with MauiKit. Placeholder name. Work in progress.

NX AppHub takes inspiration from appimage-builder, deb2appimage, zap, and appimaged.

You’ll find that NX AppHub is the sum of these parts; it does the same job — only better, cleaner, and more aligned with our goals for a package-manager-free OS.

NX AppHub (CLI)

https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphub

NX AppHub CLI (a.k.a, nx-apphub-cli) is a tool for:

• Building AppBoxes (AppImages) from curated YAML recipes.
• Installing, removing, updating, and downgrading applications. No root is required.
• Search for applications from a central Git-based app specification repository.
• Generating YAML templates and Markdown descriptions from repository metadata.

What’s an AppBox?

An AppBox is an AppImage — but with some important differences:

• It is built to work in Nitrux from Debian-based packages using a curated YAML file from the central Git-based repository.
• It is managed via the command line tool, not manually downloaded or built using the command build since other local, non-curated YAML files can be used.
• It doesn’t embed AppImageUpdate metadata (updates and downgrades are handled via versioned AppBoxes).

AppBoxes give us a predictable, reproducible way to manage apps — without compromising our no-package-manager philosophy.

Please read the NX AppHub CLI wiki page, which includes further clarifications, the YAML specification to create AppBoxes, and other useful information.

NX AppHub Apps

https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphub-apps

NX AppHub Apps is a central Git-based app specification repository that contains files for NX AppHub CLI to generate AppBoxes.

• Users are encouraged to contribute to this repository. To contribute new applications, read the Contribution Workflow Guidelines.

NX AppHub Daemon

https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphubd

NX AppHub Daemon integrates AppBoxes generated with NX AppHub CLI with the desktop. Eventually, it will replace appimaged in Nitrux since AppBoxes will replace AppImages in our workflow.

• It focuses on AppBoxes, not externally obtained AppImages or manually built AppImages.
• It can be started as a user; it does not require an OpenRC service or to be started as a root.

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Requirements

• Nitrux 4.0.0 and newer.
  • 🔰 Information: To use nx-apphub-cli and nx-apphubd in previous versions of Nitrux, use a container.
• Python 3.10 and newer.

NX AppHub CLI and NX AppHub Daemon require the following utilities to function properly:

appstream
binutils
file
fuse3
git
libfuse2t64
patchelf
zstd

Installation

To install NX AppHub CLI, we recommend using pipx.

• Single-user

pipx install git+https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphub.git

• System-wide

pipx install --system-site-packages git+https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphub.git

To install NX AppHub Daemon, we recommend using pipx.

• Single-user

pipx install git+https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphubd.git

• System-wide

pipx install --system-site-packages git+https://github.com/Nitrux/nx-apphubd.git

Usage

To use NX AppHub CLI, check the commands below.

• install→ Install one or more applications.
• remove → Remove one or more installed applications.
• update → Update one or more installed applications.
• downgrade → Downgrade one or more installed applications.
• search → Search for specific applications.
• show → Show installed applications.
• build → Build an AppImage from a local YAML file.
  • --appdir-lint → It optionally debugs missing shared libraries in an AppImage.
• generate → Generate YAML template from package metadata.
  • --package → Specify the package name.
  • --distro→ Choose the distribution from which to get metadata.
  • --release → The release of the selected distribution.
  • --arch → Specify the target architecture.
  • --output → The file name of the generated YAML file.
  • --description-output → The file name of the generated metadata file.

To use NX AppHub Daemon, simply run it.