Rogue icon

You sometimes swear you removed a program with the package manager or by running an uninstall script but the icon still shows up, (and it’s broken!)

Solution

In Manjaro-GNOME, you can easily look up where this .desktop entry is at by looking at the paths that are established by convention:

Location Type	Path
System-wide apps	/usr/share/applications/
User-specific apps	~/.local/share/applications/
Flatpak (per-user)	~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications/
Flatpak (system)	/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/

You can search in any of these places, (hopefully you didn’t use the flatpak version, that’s not good). An easy to use command to grep for the entry is: grep -ril "appname" <path>. When the specific offender has been found, you can easily delete it.

What is a desktop file?

For those uninitiated, on DE (Desktop Environments) on Linux, they tend to have all the shortcuts named as desktop entries. These are .desktop files with a structure such as this one:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
TryExec=alacritty
Exec=alacritty
Icon=Alacritty
Terminal=false
Categories=System;TerminalEmulator;

Name=Alacritty
GenericName=Terminal
Comment=A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=Alacritty
Actions=New;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.28

[Desktop Action New]
Name=New Terminal
Exec=alacritty

These are simple text files that will tell the DE where an executable for a file is at, where its icon is at, besides other metadata that is fed into the entry that can then show up on your desktop/main menu/search.

In short, you can add these entries as any text file in the respective path and the DE should pick it up and allow for you to execute it so that it patches back to the respective application.

How to keep desktop entries clean

When looking at a specific line in the alacritty .desktop file you might notice that the Exec is literally just alacritty which would imply alacritty is somehow available globally.

The way to let GNOME see this executable is discused at the alacritty section, however, what you need to know at least when it comes to GNOME is that it will only detect as “global” executables, binaries that are at

• /usr/bin
• /usr/local/bin

Any sort of executable we want to reference directly without a full path we should make sure is at either of these two paths (by convention /usr/local/bin is for software installed locally, so not installed by the package manager).