Appimages integration

Question

I have download Scrivener Appimage on Ubuntu 20.04 but it not integrate on the menu using Appimage Launcher. What’s the problem? Settings on the launcher or the application? Hope for some help Thanks Josef

Answer 1

There is no problem. This is how AppImages work. They are not set up by your operating system, so your operating system will not set up application menu entries the way it is done for applications installed using the package management system, APT , of the operating system.

AppImages are self contained applications, that ship all their dependencies etc. in the executable file itself. When you run an Appimage, a file system contained in the AppImage file will be mounted and the executable will be run from there. Some AppImages actually may ask you to integrate into your application menu, but this is not the standard, and most don't.

To integrate AppImages, you would need to create an item in the application menu yourself. Unfortunately, default Ubuntu does not provide graphical tools to facilitate this, but you could use a tool like Alacarte to do this. Otherwise, you need to do it manually, i.e. creating a suitable .desktop launcher in ~/.local/share/applications, and installing an icon in either ~/.local/share/icons or ~/.icons.

You can read more about it here on Linux Uprising. There, reference is made to to a nice tool that is under development, AppImageLauncher, that is designed to automate the integration of downloaded AppImages in your system. Although it exists for a couple of years now, it still did not make it into the standard Ubuntu software sources.