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editing .desktop files for Flatpak apps (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml to c/kde@lemmy.ml
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so, I have a couple of Flatpak electron apps that need to be coerced into running under Wayland (Element, Freetube, etc.). they run fine with Xwayland, but I need xlsclients (show Xwayland apps) output to be empty for unrelated reasons. so what I'm doing is:

  1. determining where the .desktop file is, by way of right-clicking app in the Application Launcher, Edit Application, etc.
  2. reconstructing where the file actually is, as I usually get a symlink
  3. copying the file to ~/.local/share/applications/
  4. editing the file to add --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --ozone-platform=wayland or whatever its case may be

that's it, Plasma picks up the change almost instantly.

this seems super-convoluted, is there a better way?

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[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

Why don't you use the "Edit Applications" feature (Menu Editor) itself?

If you edit something there and click "Save", it should automatically copy the .desktop file into ~/.local/share/applications/ with the changes you specified...

[-] dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I tried that initally, says there's insufficient write access to .l/s/a (it's 0700) an then creates an invalid symlink:

$ ll .local/share/applications/org.signal.Signal.desktop
lrwxrwxrwx@ - i 14 Dec 15:22 .local/share/applications/org.signal.Signal.desktop -> ../../../app/org.signal.Signal/current/active/export/share/applications/org.signal.Signal.desktop

searching helped me nada, so that's why I started manually editing 'em.

edit: there's a bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394476

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Interesting. It seems to be working for me, but the application entry I tried to edit (SpeedCrunch) was from the flathub.org repo that's pre-included, so I guess, maybe that repo is set up correctly, for this bug not to occur? Maybe that's a distro-specific thing?

But yeah, did you try the workaround that's mentioned in the bug report (creating the Flatpak repo as non-root)?

[-] dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

yeah I remote-delete'd all the ones that were there by default and then added flathub without the --user flag, as was the custom at the time, so I guess that's the culprit. no biggie, it works this way too and the couple of apps that need to be cajoled don't need that daily. the question was about the perceived cumbersomeness about fixing, but it turns out it's due to my tinkering.

this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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