Ah, that's what I suspected, that's some unfortuna...

# compose-desktop

[outadoc]

Ah, that's what I suspected, that's some unfortunate naming 😓
Thank you, I didn't know about Nucleus. It looks a bit heavy for my use case, so it will be a hard sell there. The heavy use of AI in the docs is also not a great first impression, to be perfectly honest.
It does display a lot of cool features so I'll check it out and test drive it on my side project, but hopefully Jetbrains is open to the idea of upstreaming some of the cool ideas of Nucleus in the future!

[Michael Paus]

Nucleus is new and initially had some issues but building works quite well now. Switching is almost trivial if you only want the (real) AppImage support. It is only heavy because it has a lot of cool features (auto-update for example) but you don't have to use them all right from the beginning. Nucleus also doesn't try to re-invent every wheel. It builds on the well established electron builder, for example, which already ensures a certain level of maturity.

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I package my Compose app into AppImage without using any Compose specific tooling. You just need to move some things around to confirm to the directory structure AppImage needs, create the necessary XML metadata file, and then just call appimagetool

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I followed this: https://docs.appimage.org/packaging-guide/manual.html
Using the "manual steps" to build an AppImage by hand and once that worked, writing a build script for myself that does the same

[אליהו הדס]

Yes, Nucleus as a packager is not heavy at all — it's a Gradle plugin that uses Electron Builder internally, with quite a few cool extra features. For example, it can strip out unused native libraries, which can save you around 20 MB and make your app noticeably lighter. You can also pretty easily get a dramatic boost in startup speed through Leyden. Nucleus is fully modular — you only pull in what you need, with each feature as a separate library on Maven.