For instance, adding an option in the right click menu to do just that, or being allowed to drag and drop the file to the taskbar. This would be particularly helpful with AppImages but also with any executable and / or script in general.
Just my opinion as a user, but this seems to only make it more complicated for very little benefit.
As of now, the app entries GNOME uses are defined by a universally accepted standard with the desktop files.
If you would want to allow for AppImages to be “added with drag-and-drop”, you would need to add additional, separate code to read an AppImage, pull icons, name and run information from it, and then store it somewhere. You would also need to check regularly if the AppImage still exists, to prevent a dead link. With the desktop files, they are either provided by a package manager, where this can be managed by the system, or it can be expected that the user knows what they is doing when they are doing it manually.
That is a quite a bit of code which needs not only to be written, but also maintained.
And that is basically for only AppImages. You mention “scripts and other executables”, but those could only be a link with an generic icon…
To be frank, ideally software should be installed by following tested, standardized methods, which under Linux are packages, either “native” (like deb or rpm), or Flatpak. With any other method, you are the one responsible to ensure they work, and it shouldn’t be expected to be done by the system.
So, if you want to use AppImages, it is on you to integrate them into the system. You can create a desktop file in the ~/.local/share/applications folder, which is then picked up by the system after updating by running the update-desktop-database command.
Alternatively, you can use tools which can handle AppImage integration:
Can’t you just do whatever it is that is being currently done to show the icon in the desktop itself?
No you don’t. Windows doesn’t do that and there is nothing wrong with that. Just show an error saying that the file could not be found if its location changes and a suggestion to remove the icon from the taskbar.
That’s literally what windows does and there is nothing wrong with having a generic icon for that.
What do you mean “in the desktop itself”? Perhaps you have an extension like Desktop Icons NG installed? GNOME doesn’t have desktop icons natively
Anyway, if you do have DING installed, then you’re looking at a view of files. The dash (which I think is what you’re referring to by “taskbar”) is a list of apps. They’re showing very different things, so no you can’t just do the same thing in both cases.
My bad, my desktop didn’t show the AppImage icon and I just assumed that there was a problem with it that I never really bothered to try to fix. Now I realize that AppImages don’t show their icon by default in gnome because you need an extension or something for that.
We would have to show the generic AppImage icon then, just like you would show a generic icon for executables and script.
You could just add a default desktop file to the appropriate location that only has “Exec=” and run the exact same command that would be run if you right clicked and selected “Run as a program”. And maybe a “Name=” with the name of the file being run.
So, but the question still is “Why should we add additional code which needs maintenance to do this”?
There are already established systems for installing applications and integrating them with the desktop. These are the packaging systems, the desktop files and the Linux filesystem standard, to name a few.
From my view point, the only exceptions which don’t use these systems are:
- developement builds, which are launched from the development environment
- user-scripts/programs, where you can reasonably ask the user to create a desktop file themselves
…and AppImages.
AppImages are the outlier here, following the application bundle concept of macOS instead of the Linux conventions.
And I personally don’t think this is enough to warrant special code. Especially if there are tools like Gear Lever already existing which simplifies the process of system integration.
AppImage also doesn’t have great ways to associate a running window to the icon that it was launched with. So even if it’s pinned to the dash, launching it via the dash will still give you a nice extra icon with no icon on it. One of many problems with the format.
Anyway, I agree that it’s quite unlikely that there will be anyone in GNOME interested in writing any code to work around AppImage’s design when well established solutions exist and work