I am new to appimage and linux as a whole. I am wondering if i create appimage of applications that save data in the home folder, like firefox and thunderbird, will they still save their profiles in the home folder?
I can’t promise that Firefox or Thunderbird would do it properly because they are both very complex applications that change very quickly but yes AppImages are meant to use /home folders.
AppImages use /home just like any other application to store configs, settings, user data, etc.
This actually means that you can install an app via DEBs and then load the same app as an AppImage and the AppImage will use the same configuration, etc files as the previous DEB install.
Another benefit this provides is you can have multiple versions of the same AppImage and share all the settings between all different AppImages.
AppImages are immutable, which means read-only, by design. Applications should write to $HOME. This is the same when you install an application using the package manager to /usr. Then the application, running as a normal user, will also not be able to write there.
What do you mean read-only by design? I downloaded chromium and the .appimage file had write permissions for owner and group. Do i have to remove them? Also, if i want to edit some file inside the bundle how can i do that?
What is inside an AppImage cannot be changed without unpacking and re-packing the filesystem contained inside the AppImage, because ISO9660 (type 1 AppImages) or squashfs (type 2 AppImages) is used, which are by nature read-only.
An user in our chat has recently made a Firefox AppImage that does that, by exporting $HOME from a custom AppRun bash script.
So do write permissions matter ??
Write permissions on what? The AppImage? No, because it contains a read-only filesystem by design.
Yes, such AppImages can now be made. See Portable configuration data - #10 by probono