AppImageLauncher | Helper application for Linux distributions

AppImageLauncher is a C++ library typically used in User Interface, Electron applications. AppImageLauncher has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has medium support. You can download it from GitHub.

Currently, desktop environments consider exexutables a security risk, and would rather have users use the app stores they include. The ability to easily run them, however, isn't all that's needed to provide a good AppImage desktop experience. Making them accessible from the application menus and launchers is a level of "desktop integration" that can't be provided by the AppImages themselves properly (even though some AppImages ship with a "desktop integration script" prompting the user to do so). There are too many impliciations requiring external software, especially regarding cleanup and removal of AppImages. (If applications are simply made executable, they're still spread all over the users' personal files and folders.) The average user will not find a "Downloads" directory full of AppImages with cryptic filenames friendly. Therefore, system-side ways have been developed to perform the desktop integration. One of the first solutions wasappimaged, a daemon users could install to perform everything automagically in the background, without notifying the user in any way. It scans a predefined set of directories including ~/Downloads and ~/.bin, making recognized AppImages executable and then performing the desktop integration. Those operations and monitoring produced a lot of file I/O, so were rather inefficent. Also, many users don't like the lack of control. The approach also opens attack vectors and thus can be considered a security hazard, as a vulnerability discovered in appimaged recently has shown.