Usability problems with Appimages

[cgarry]

I shall try and give you some answers until somebody with more knowledge can give more accurate answers.

1. Yes, unnecessary effort as you could leave the the file in ~/Downloads if you like. However, I would suggest moving your AppImages to ~/bin to keep them in one place and help you with your issue 4. appimaged also checks the ~/bin directory which will help.

2. AppImages can be stored wherever you like, but a directory that appimaged monitors is preferable if you want to use appimaged to keep things simple.

3. Version 1 AppImages did have the problem that they had a popup dialogue that offered to install a desktop icon file but there way no way to uninstall. However, this approach has been deprecated and version 2 AppImages do not offer to install themselves. If you are using appimaged, then deleting the AppImage file will uninstall it from your system.

4. I do not know of any way to list all the ‘installed’ AppImages. The best way that I can think of doing this is to use appimaged and move all of your AppImages to ~/bin.

Basically, have a look at appimaged and see if you think it helps:

New appimaged: Optional daemon that registers AppImages with the system

appimaged is an optional daemon that watches locations like ~/bin and ~/Downloads for AppImages and if it detects some, registers them with the system, so that they show up in the menu, have their icons show up, MIME types associated, etc. It also unregisters AppImages again from the system if they are deleted. If firejail is installed, it runs the AppImages with it. A precompiled version can be found in the last successful Travis CI build, you can get from https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageK…

Cheers,
Chris