Current Best Practices for Using Portable AppImage on Linux?

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1

Operating system

Linux

Joplin version

2.12.19

Desktop version info

Sync target

Nextcloud

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What issue do you have?

I have a chromebook I have corebooted and replaced with Arch Linux. One limitation is that it has only a total of 16GB storage and there is no possibility of expansion as the storage is an MMC soldered directly to the motherboard.

I was thinking about using Joplin as an AppImage on a USB drive, and I was interested in the best practices for how to do this in a way that best isolates it from the running system, as the accumulation of data in caches, etc. on the main storage add up over time.

Based on my reading, this should be as simple as adding Joplin.Appimage.home and Joplin.Appimage.config to the USB drive. I'm curious if there is anything else that needs to be known in advance.

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So far I have tried it in a Virtual Machine running arch and I get

./Joplin.AppImage
Setting $HOME to /run/media/ben/Ventoy/appimage/Joplin.AppImage.home
Setting $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to /run/media/ben/Ventoy/appimage/Joplin.AppImage.config
[4615:1121/145354.958364:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(338)] Failed to create /run/media/ben/Ventoy/appimage/Joplin.AppImage.config/Joplin/SingletonLock: Operation not permitted (1)
libva error: vaGetDriverNames() failed with unknown libva error

I'm not sure if the problem is that the USB drive is formatted as ExFAT. If so it is a shame as exfat is the filesystem that works with Ventoy

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[4615:1121/145354.958364:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(338)] Failed to create /run/media/ben/Ventoy/appimage/Joplin.AppImage.config/Joplin/SingletonLock: Operation not permitted (1)

Is apparently due to the ExFAT filesystem as moving it into the native ext4 filesystem made this error go away.

libva error: vaGetDriverNames() failed with unknown libva error was a relic of using the virtual machine as when I switched to the real hardware it went away.

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I can confirm that the filesystem was the issue as I can now successfully use the AppImage with localized data. Ventoy defaults to exFAT but supports ext4 if desired with the caveat that using Ventoy to boot isos will fail if you are trying to boot Windows or an OS that does not support ext4.

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