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EoghanM
Asked: 2019-08-15 05:19:20 +0800 CST

.desktop launcher - keep different chromium apps separate

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I've got the following .desktop files placed in ~/.local/share/applications for custom launchers for a full screen experience of Chromium:

[Desktop Entry]
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=FastMail
Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser --app=https://www.fastmail.com/mail/Inbox/
Icon=fastmail-icon.svg

And

 [Desktop Entry]
 Terminal=false
 Type=Application
 Name=SoundCloud
 Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser --app=https://soundcloud.com/stream
 Icon=soundcloud-icon.svg

These sit in the Launcher (after adding them from the Dash) and launch their respective full screen web-app-as-desktop app experiences fine.

The problem is that if I open both of them, Unity gets confused and puts them all under the same icon.

Any way to work around this?

unity launcher chromium .desktop

1 Answers

  1. [Edit: this workaround doesn't work for Snap packages, which is how the new chromium is installed]

    Ok I hacked around it by creating copies of the executable (had to be the /usr/lib/ executable and not the /usr/bin/ script):

    sudo ln /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser-soundcloud
sudo ln /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser-fastmail

    Then updated the .desktop files to point to e.g. /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser-fastmail instead of /usr/bin/chromium-browser

    I also added a TryExec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser

    Let me know if anyone has a better way of doing it according to the desktop spec at https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/

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