Open source portable application platforms

In this post we are going to suggest some open source portable application platforms. This type of application was widely used in times when smartphones were more phones than smartphones, tablets had not been invented and notebooks were not available to everyone.

In a few words, these are programs that do not need installation so they can be carried on a pendrive and used on any computer. In fact, they usually work much better under WINE than traditional applications.

What are portable applications

I suppose that a more appropriate term would be portable applications, but as is often the case, the Spanishization of the English term prevailed over the idiomatic correctness, so we are going to leave it in portables.

Differences between common and portable applications

Developing a computer program takes a lot of time and money. It is natural then that those who create them do not want to reinvent the wheel. There are functions common to all programs, although their general purpose is not the same and if each of them included the code to do them, there would be no storage device that would reach. For example, Firefox, LibreOffice or The Gimp allow you to print files.

To solve this, a library system is used. If you installed programs in Windows, you will have seen that sometimes they indicate the need to download other programs as a requirement for operation. If in the future you install any other application that needs it, it is already available.

Libraries are programs that perform functions common to other programs. in most cases they come with the operating system, although as I said it may be necessary to download them. Once we do that they will be available to all programs that need them.

For portable applications, these come with their own libraries and do not share them with other applications on the host operating system.

Differences between portable and self-contained applications

Although portable and self-contained applications (I am referring to those distributed in Snap, Flatpak and Appimage format) share the characteristics of not using host operating system libraries, there are fundamental differences.

• Self-contained applications need to be installed and only work within the operating system and computer on which they were installed. If you want to use them on another computer, they must be reinstalled. Laptops are launched by double-clicking on their launcher and only need a compatible operating system.
• Self-contained applications are updated from the package manager or terminal. If we want a more current version of a portable application, we will have to download it manually.

Portable Application Platforms

For Windows, the best-known repository of open source portable applications is Portable Apps. From your website it is possible download an application that allows us to later find and obtain the programs we need. Another option is to download them manually. It must be said that not all the titles in the catalog are open source.

According to those responsible for the project, the programs work with all versions of Windows from XP to 11 for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

LiberKey is a good alternative to PortableApps. Although the titles are similar and the caveat remains that not all titles are open source, It has the advantage that the program takes care of updating the applications. In this case you can not choose what to install, but it comes in 3 versions with three different assortments of programs.

Currently there does not seem to be a portable application platform for Linux that is still in operation. To tell the truth, Linux distributions are themselves portable applications since they can be installed on a pen drive or external disk and, at least the most important ones, will adapt to the change of hardware in a few minutes.

However, as I said above, portable Windows applications usually work fine under WINE.