Adding desktop icon to applications on Pop!_OS

Something that should be quite easy — but since there are multiple ways to install applications on Linux, not all of them add an icon for you. So here is the bare minimum you need to do to add an icon to an application.

First create a .desktop file on your desktop.

nano ~/Desktop/Godot.desktop

Now add the following code, and adjust the location to match your application and icon location. Here I’ve downloaded and copied Godot to Applications in my home directory.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Godot
Exec=/home/nope/Applications/Godot_v4.4-stable_mono_linux.x86_64
Icon=/home/nope/Applications/GodotIcon.png
Terminal=false

After saving the file, we need to make it executable, to be able to run the application by clicking the icon.

chmod +x ~/Desktop/Godot.desktop

Before you can just start the application by clicking it, you need to right-click the icon and select “Allow Launching”.

That’s it! You can now run the application by simply clicking the icon.

Optional

If you want to add the application to the application menu. You just have to copy the .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/ and the application will show up in the application menu.