[TriLUG] release format for commercial project

[Wes Garrison via TriLUG]

Thanks Bill and Stephen for the great feedback.

I built an AppImage and it actually works great with our embedded database
right out of the box, so I was misinformed.

It actually worked better with our build system than Flatpak, so we may
favor AppImage instead.  I'd still like to support Flatpak for those who
want it, as that will let us distribute on Flathub and hopefully help us
find an audience, but it's not our top priority.

We're using Postgres because we're going to offer users the option to host
on their local network in addition to just locally on their PC, and we'd
like to use the same DB if possible.

We're hoping we will find an audience of folks who hate the new "you will
own nothing" paradigm, and want to purchase software once and use it as
long as it suits their needs.

Now that QuickBooks is no longer offering a desktop version at all, that
gives us an opportunity to grab some of those customers.

We're calling our product "FQB", for "First Quality Books" obviously.

Here's our IndieGoGo campaign if anyone is interested in following us:
https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/fqb-accounting/first-quality-books

...and we have dark mode :)

Thanks again for the feedback,

-Wes

On Thu, Sep 17, 2026 at 7:34 AM Stephen Wiley <swiley at swiley.net> wrote:

> I've always preferred AppImage to Flatpak even when I was running Alpine
> (I think I typically ran them in a chroot.)
>
> Is there a reason you went with Postgress instead of Sqlite? That's kind
> of an intense RDBMS to be embedding.
>
> --Stephen
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 10:42:44PM -0400, Wes Garrison via TriLUG wrote:
> > Hey folks,
> >
> > We're about ready to release testing versions of our Business Bookkeeping
> > product to compete with QuickBooks.
> >
> > Currently I'm building a .deb, .rpm, and .pacman. (x64/amd64 only, no
> arm64
> > yet for win or linux, but the macOS build supports arm64 and Intel)
> >
> > Flatpak works, but building it is a clunky process.  Everything seems to
> > install and work if you install it for the system, but the icon doesn't
> > show up, and installing it with `flatpak --user` is confusing.
> >
> > How important is flatpak to people?  We probably won't release to Flathub
> > even if we build a flatpak.
> >
> > I don't really want to do Snap, and appimage doesn't seem right for our
> use
> > case, since we are using an embedded Postgresql database, but I'm willing
> > to be convinced otherwise.
> >
> > Building for Alpine seems like a huge pain, and it's a small user base,
> > even by Linux standards.
> >
> > How much effort should I put into flatpak, and should I be considering
> > other options besides the 3 I mentioned?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > -Wes
> > --
> > This message was sent to: Stephen Wiley <swiley at swiley.net>
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>