The objective of this tutorial is to show you how to create a desktop shortcut launcher on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux using the default GNOME user interface.
Ubuntu mostly relies on its sidebar app launcher, but desktop shortcut launchers can allow you to open applications or websites super fast, since they live right on your desktop and make the targets only a click away. They are also easy to drag around the desktop so you can organize them any way you want to.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to create desktop shortcut launcher from existing .desktop files
How to create desktop shortcut launcher from scratch
Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user
Create desktop shortcut launcher on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
Create desktop shortcut launcher from existing .desktop files
Start by opening a command line terminal and executing the following command. This will open a list of shortcuts for all of your installed applications. For all Snap installed applications use /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ directory instead.
$ nautilus /usr/share/applications/
In the file browser window that just opened, find an Application you wish to create a Launcher for on your desktop. Perform right click and Copy action.
👁 Right click on any of the applications listed and press copy Right click on any of the applications listed and press copy
The last thing we need to do is right click on the newly created desktop shortcut and click on Allow Launching. Otherwise, the new icon will not be usable.
👁 Right click on desktop shortcut and click Allow Launching Right click on desktop shortcut and click Allow Launching
Create a desktop application shortcut launcher manually
In case the desktop shortcut for your application is not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory you have an option to create the Desktop launcher manually. In this example we will create and Desktop application shortcut for Skype application.
Obtain the following information for any given application you wish to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:
To obtain a full path to executable binary of any program use the which command eg.:
$ which skype
/snap/bin/skype
In regards to the application icon, the choice is yours. You can either head over to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ directory and search for any relevant icon to use, or simply download new icon from the web.
Now that we have all the necessary information, create a new file Skype.desktop within ~/Desktop directory using your favourite text editor and paste the following lines as part of the file’s content. Change the code where necessary to fit your application specific details.
Now that the desktop icon is created, right click on the new desktop file located on your desktop and select Allow Launching.
👁 Right click on desktop shortcut and click Allow Launching Right click on desktop shortcut and click Allow Launching
In this tutorial, we saw how to create a desktop shortcut launcher on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. As you can see, the process is quite simple, and the icons nicely complement the sidebar app launcher as an alternative way to open some of our most used applications.
