Meta package management

Chob

As many of us are fond of saying, Linux is all about choice, and it can be difficult to argue that there's sometimes a little too much choice to wade through when you need one simple thing to get a job done. Package management has become a little like this, with a plethora of cross-distribution solutions offering imperfect coverage of applications, utilities, servers, and tools that might not otherwise be available in your distribution's package manager. You might only be able to install LXD with Snap packages, for example, or the latest Steam from its Flatpak. And then your favorite game might only provide an AppImage, while your distribution remains two or three major releases behind. Navigating this set of meta-dependencies can be confusing, and it's this confusion that this brilliant little project tries to solve.

Chob is best described as a meta package manager for third-party package management. It currently supports Flathub for Flatpak packages, Snap Store for Snap packages and AppImages via a search through appimage.github.io, which is itself a service that catalogs AppImage packages created by GitHub projects. With the exception of AppImage, you'll also need either Flatpak or Snap to be installed before you start, but Chub will handle the package installation itself. It takes a package name as the single argument, and will present results from all three resources, letting you choose the source you'd prefer. One option we'd love to see is a version comparison of the packages returned, so you can install whichever is the latest version, but we understand comparing version strings across different package formats is going to be difficult. However, if you need a simple tool to help with easy package installation, Chob is still definitely worth a look.

Project Website

https://github.com/MuhammedKpln/chob

Chob can search for and install Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage packages from a single command.

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