[Brian_K_White]

I unpack them because the app runs faster, no container/fs problems, and I use apps where I want to access the files in the app. Kicad in particular has a load of component files that I always want to copy from /usr/lib into each project so that the project is fully self contained and in a nicer way than the way kicad does it itself.

freecad has a problem where it uses python, and python3 defaults to shitting turds (pycache directories) everywhere it's executed. There is a way to tell python not to do that, but that mechanism is not possible when the app is an appimage. But is possible if the appimage is unpacked.

It's a simple, but totally manual process to unpack and integrate into the desktop fully so that file types autolaunch the app and displays the icon in the file manager. I started to write a script to automate it but there is just enough variation in the way appimages are constructed that it's annoying to try to script even though it's pretty easy to do manually.