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AppImage / AppImageSpec

This repository holds the specification for the AppImage format.
http://appimage.org/
MIT License
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~/Applications directory? #46

Closed Samueru-sama closed 3 months ago

Samueru-sama commented 3 months ago

I noticed that the spec has no mentions of the ~/Applications directory.

While appimages are made to be run from any location, several tools normally look for several common locations to integrate appimages, one of those locations is usually ~/Applications and iirc it is the default location used by AppImageLauncher and others.

Something I don't like is that ~/Applications is in english, for example ES-DE will look for appimages in ~/Applications.

I think this location has to have its own env variable akin to the XDG user directories, something like XDG_APPLICATIONS_DIR which would default to ~/Applications when not set but the user can change to anything of their liking, including their language.

Appimage daemons also look for appimages in ~/Downloads do they follow the XDG user directories and also look in XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR?

TheAssassin commented 3 months ago

~/Applications is a concept primarily used in AppImageLauncher. It is not translated for a purpose, as it is not standard to any distribution or desktop environment. Please create a discussion in AppImageLauncher's repository to discuss the directory.

Samueru-sama commented 3 months ago

~/Applications is a concept primarily used in AppImageLauncher. It is not translated for a purpose, as it is not standard to any distribution or desktop environment. Please create a discussion in AppImageLauncher's repository to discuss the directory.

That's the problem though, that on some instances ~/Applications ends up being hardcoded like in the case of ES-DE and that is what I want to avoid, if it were added as a env variable to the spec then that's all that the appimage integration tools have to look for instead, that way one doesn't need to go to each separate repo asking for the ability to that location to be changed in the application itself, which is more work than the application checking a env variable.

Also isn't that taken from MacOS?

TheAssassin commented 3 months ago

Again, the specification does not contain information to this because it has not originated from the core AppImage tooling and spec.

probonopd commented 3 months ago

The AppImage file format is intentionally designed so that users can put AppImages anywhere in the filesystem, including CD-ROMs, DVDs, USB drives, network shares, etc. - on the $PATH or out of the $PATH.

There is no recommended location. That is up to the individual desktop environments.

People have put them in /bin, $HOME/.local/bin/, /opt, ~/Downloads, to name just a few examples.