In particular I'm thinking about Inkscape.

I'm using Fedora 39 Cinnamon and have Inkscape 1.3.2 (latest stable as per feb. 2024) installed by flatpak.

However, I also have the appimage version of Inkscape 1.1.2 - fallback if it turns out the latest version get unstable for my projects.

However - there is a caveat. Both the flatpak version and the appimage version points to the same config file:
/home/grobe/.config/inkscape/preferences.xml
and thus each Inkscape version can potentially make a mess for the other version because pointing to same setting file.

I can probably partially solve the issue by using a bash script and use the export command to tell Inkscape to use another folder for /home. However this will probably cause problems when trying to open files that is located inside the actual /home directory - haven't tested this.

I do not want to solve this by having a script file that temporarily rename the config/inkscape folder for the session, because it still have a potential for causing mess if I'm unfortuately happens to open the other version of Inkscape while still running.

Any ideas? Some features of appimages that I haven't taught about yet ?

I would just make a copy of the XML files to something like "oldinkscape.xml" and "newinkscape.xml", then when you run the program, you can go into System settings and choose one to restore from. Since you've got a copy, it'll just shove it to the above-mentioned filename each time, but it'll be version dependent. It's a little bit of a pain, but it'd be SLIGHTLY clean.

Yes I know, and I also asked for a different approach to avoid this method if possible - I consider renaming parent folder or xml file itself to be the same method.

Any other approach not already mention ?

I may put a feature request for Inkscape itself so that it will accept a parameter specifying where the settings file are located. But this question is not only related to Inkscape.


[edit 1]
Seems like this feature is actually added to the windows version:
https://alpha.inkscape.org/vectors/f...indexf294.html


[edit 2]

I found a way of change the config location for Inkscape installed normally - probably works the same for flatpak, but I've only tested on Inkscape that was installed normally from the repository.

Without further due, it goes like this:
Because Inkscape actually supports the INKSCAPE_PROFILE_DIR variable.