I have freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 and Anaconda (with Python 3.7) in my laptop, and I want to set up a launcher icon for the Spyder IDE in the Favourites bar - something I've done many times in the past couple of years when running Ubuntu 16.
I can successfully launch Spyder from the Terminal and it seems to be working fine, but when I run it from the terminal and right-click the icon, it does not give me an option for adding it to Favorites.
[Strangely, searching for an application named "spyder" returns no results; not sure if this might be related, but...]
I understand I can manually add an icon for it by creating a .desktop file, as described here and here, and adding it to /usr/share/applications, as described here. For example, I have tried using the following spyder.desktop file (available in the Spyder Github):
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Spyder
GenericName=Spyder
Comment=The Scientific Python Development Environment
Icon=spyder
TryExec=spyder
Exec=spyder %F
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/x-python;
Categories=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
Keywords=Development;Science;IDE;Qt;
StartupNotify=true
X-AppStream-Ignore=True
StartupWMClass=Spyder
However, even after creating this file, Spyder still does not show up in Applications. And if I try to run this file, I get a fairly generic
"There was an error launching the application"
message.
Is this a known issue with Spyder and/or Ubuntu 18? Am I missing something here? Any help would be much appreciated! Many thanks!