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Write an article/section for desktop environment developers on how to handle application bundles

Open probonopd opened this issue 6 months ago • 1 comments

TODO: Write an article/section for desktop environment developers on how to handle application bundles.

The plethora of currently available "desktop integration" "solutions" are crude workarounds for the fact that most desktop environments do not handle application bundles like .app, .AppDir, and .AppImage natively:

  1. Ask the user whether to set the executable bit when ELF binaries are opened by the user which are lacking this bit
  2. Show the application icon embedded in the bundle
  3. Handle .app and .AppDir opaque (like files rather than folders)
  4. If applications exit with an error code within a few seconds after being launched, show the error in the GUI
  5. etc.

Since i have written file managers (e.g., https://github.com/probonopd/Filer) which do this properly, maybe I should write a description of how to support such application bundles, in the hope that developers of KDE, XFCE, Cosmic, etc. might take interest.

Thanks to @ivan-hc for triggering this idea in a discussion.

probonopd avatar Aug 07 '24 19:08 probonopd