Viber-AppImage-Enhanced 🐧

• Latest Stable Release

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Unofficial AppImage of Viber, which works on any Linux distribution and is more reliable than the official Viber AppImage, hence the -Enhanced suffix.

Official Viber AppImage issues

• It depends on the EOL libfuse2 library, which had the last release in 2019.
  • Linux distributions like Ubuntu and others don't ship libfuse2, so Viber AppImage doesn't work by default
• It doesn't bundle every library that is necessary for the app function

How this AppImage solves the above issues

• It doesn't depend on libfuse at all, as it can utilize kernel's unprivileged user namespaces function or as a fallback simply extract directory to /tmp/ and run
  • Thanks to the uruntime
• It ships all the needed libs, binaries and directories reliably and relatively easy, thanks to the robust stracing system called sharun and it's wrapper quick-sharun
  • If it ever happens that some dependencies are missing, it's clear to troubleshoot with APPIMAGE_DEBUG=1 variable
• GPU acceleration, video camera function, calls, notifications, everything is tested to work accordingly compared to the upstream app capabilities

Requirements

They are very minimal, but they are just listed here for transparency.

AppImage's side:

• /bin/sh POSIX shell
• /tmp/ directory that is writable

Viber's side:

• Linux 3.8+ kernel
  • application uses QtWebEngine, which depends on unprivileged user namespaces, which were introduced in Linux 3.8 kernel (released in 2013)
• display server being active (X11 or Wayland)

Not mandatory, but recommended:

• xdg-open (part of xdg-utils)
  • So opening URLs or files redirects to the default system applications (clicking on URL opens the web browser, clicking on file opens the file manager etc.)

Screenshot of Viber-AppImage-Enhanced working on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS VM

Click to preview

Screenshot on why AppImage is preferred for low-storage devices

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Known quirk

• "Launch Viber in the background" option is grayed-out in settings
  • This is a known upstream issue and I'm not sure why they disabled it when that function is available.
    To enable this, which will create the silent autostart entry on app start, you can either do these things:
    • enter this command in terminal once:
      /path/to/viber-appimage --appimage-add-env APPIMAGE_VIBER_AUTOSTART=1
      which will add the persisting APPIMAGE_VIBER_AUTOSTART=1 variable to the AppImage env file
    • pass the --auto-start as the 1st argument to the AppImage:
      /path/to/viber-appimage --auto-start

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More at: AnyLinux-AppImages