I’m brand new to budgie, after dealing with various issues with KDE, I decided to move but I didn’t like how GNOME looked, so here I am lol.
I like Budgie a lot so far, but there are some things I’m having issues with, specifically being creating desktop shortcuts. I’m used to the easy “right click to do x” option, but this doesn’t seem to be a thing on Budgie. So how do I easily create desktop shortcuts to apps I’ve installed? I am able to do it through Steam, or other game launchers that ask to do it, but I cannot do it myself.
I installed a game through FlatHub on the Software app, I want to pin it to the my desktop, but don’t know how. Any help is greatly appreciated, sorry for newb questions, I genuinely just couldn’t find what I needed after a fair bit of researching online.
I realized I think I put this topic in the wrong section, is there a way for me to get it moved, or cross-post to the Budgie Desktop topic? Or will I just have to recreate the thread?
Forian Diesch seems to have stopped developing Arronax — from the professor that Captain Nemo took aboard the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea — but thanks to Ji m, it can still be installed on UB 24.04 (See the update in the ‘Installation’ section):
Note: Install the extension for Nemo instead of the one for Nautilus. sudo apt install arronax arronax-nemo
The interface is quite old-school and doesn’t fit in aesthetically speaking, but there are many features that allow you to quickly create launchers for applications, files, and folders, which can be displayed on the desktops of all major environments… including Budgie.
TIP: To copy and paste the command to run applications (even Flatpaks), launch “Menu Editor” and search for the desired application.
Launch the terminal (Ctrl Alt t) and copy and paste these lines to appends two aliases to the “~/.bash_aliases” file (and create it, if necessary) — I love using aliases.
Don’t forget to translate ~/Desktop into your language (twice):
cat << EOF >> ~/.bash_aliases
alias cn='_cn() { ls /usr/share/applications | grep "$1"; }; _cn' # Check the application name
alias cl='_cl() { cp /usr/share/applications/"$1".desktop ~/Desktop/"$1".desktop; chmod +x ~/Desktop/"$1".desktop; }; _cl' # Copy the launcher to the desktop
EOF
------------------
Launch a new terminal and try out your new aliases:
The first one (Check Name) allows you to check the exact name of the application from all or part of its usage name:
cn men
menulibre.desktop
The second one (Copy Launcher) copies the launcher to the desktop and makes it operational, based on the name of the application:
Sorry, I’m not complaining about the application at all! It’s a useful tool, I was just meaning that it is odd that Budgie doesn’t allow you to just right click and create a shortcut from there, or let your drag and drop on the desktop for all applications since they are capable of launching from the app menu.
Don’t worry, @Laarikin, I understood perfectly well. Some distributions allow you to do this — I won’t say which ones — while others don’t.
But Ubuntu Budgie has other advantages, doesn’t it?
But since one of my favorite things about Linux is working around problems, tinkering, and being able to do things myself, I was happy to offer you a workaround and a DIY solution.
Give the last one a try, even if you’ve never launched the terminal before. You’ll see that the terminal can be useful, even though I understand that it has a terrible reputation.
Ah my bad then! It’s a minor thing really, I just thought it strange that the ease of use, at least for this specific scenario, isn’t quite there.
When it comes to finding the executable file, I am having a rather strange issue. The game launches from a file called run.sh. When launching this file, nothing happens. There is a .desktop file within the folder, but when trying to launch that, it states that it failed to change the directory.
The game launches perfectly from the app menu in the top left corner, so I’m quite puzzled. I checked the .desktop’s properties and it just runs the command: “bash run.sh”. There must be something else to this that I cannot find mentioned online or something.
I don’t know anything about this game or how it was installed. But if I understand correctly, there is a working launcher in the main menu.
If so, the best way to find it is to open the Menu Editor, search for ‘Vintagestory’, click on the button at the bottom right of the window to copy the path to the shortcut, and then paste it into the terminal:
nemo path-to-the-shortcut
If you then copy this launcher to the desktop, it should also work as you describe.
If the launcher in the directory you showed does not work, it is because the path in its ‘Exec’ command line must be relative to the directory, not to the location of that directory.
The launcher will therefore no longer work if you copy it elsewhere without changing the path.
You can edit it to check.
