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 always assumed data was stored in the app image. Really have no idea though... Curious follow this thread.

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 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.

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.

Retroarch for example comes with a dot-starting folder where data is stored.

basically the directories just need to be created. right now im using appman to update and to automatically created directories wit -H and -C. Im hoping for the holy grail which is an appman gui program that would do this. There is kinda one but its repo thing is not done as well as with appman. Given how good appman is it makes the most sense if someone does a gui is to just kinda make a gui wrapper for it.

Yeah, I agree with appman. It's the best appimage manager there is. It can automatically update all appimages and also manage/install custom apps from github which is great.

yeah its really to bad as there is a gui but they do their own app managing rather than integrating appman which would be best. The ideal for me is an appimage that when run gives a gui to appman that assumes the directory it is run from is the directory used and also assume -H -C on all apps.