How make steam(flatpak) show the .desktop in the start-menu of the installed games? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by Vilian@lemmy.ca to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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hello folks, so, i use fedora, and i have steam installed as flatpak, i tried this suggestion i relaxed the flatpak, and log out, but the .desktop files are still in the /home/${USER}/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/applications/ how i "force" the steam to re-create the .desktop files?

thank you!

(btw i just want the start-menu icons, i don't put shortcuts in the desktop :)

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[-] hallettj@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Instead of trying to get Steam to write outside of its sandbox, I would configure the OS to search Steam's files for application launchers.

Your system searches "data" directories for directories called applications, and loads .desktop files from there. You can customize locations for data directories using the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/492878

In this case you want to set XDG_DATA_DIRS to include ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share because that is the parent of the applications directory.

I think you'll want to include the default data dirs so you don't lose your other launchers. So something like,

export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:$HOME/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share"

If I'm understanding the spec correctly you don't need to include ~/.local/share because that is the default path for XDG_DATA_HOME which is always searched, and XDG_DATA_DIRS specifies additional paths to search.

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

but that isn't gonna make some apps became confuse and install the .desktop in the steam directory?

this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023

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