I love .appimages they work on all distros, easy to install, works from any directory, works without installing
If I can achive this setup it will make switching my work from machine to machine easy-fast, resilient, and distro hopping wouldn’t be a issue.
I present to you: https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/it.mijorus.gearlever
That doesn’t solve the issue of keeping data in a specified directory.
It’s weird they don’t really really talk about it in the documentation, but yes it sleeps you to change the data path of AppImages
I’m looking through Gear Lever and don’t see anything. I only see the option to change the path where there actual Appimages are stored, not the data created by the appimages.
I see two options.
The simpler of which is to have a wrapper script that says HOME=/custom/path/for/appimage. Apps that correctly follow xdg-specs will then put all their data in that path. But not all apps will. Apps that put stuff in /home/$USER will not use the correct location.
The more foolproof way would be using something like bubblewrap, which is used by flatpak. With bubblewrap, the sandboxing can make /home/$USER appear as /custom/path/for/appimage. However, this would take more work to setup, since I presume you want the appimages to feel unsandboxed.
