desktop applications not being found in .local

[Chris]

Ubuntu MATE 17.10.1
I have written some .desktop files and placed them in ~/.local/share/applications

The $XDG_DATA_DIRS variable is not looking here, so my apps dont show up in the MATE menu:
/usr/share/mate:/usr/share/mate:/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/var/lib/snapd/desktop

.local was included in Ubuntu Gnome and in other distros - this should be fixed in MATE, by adding $HOME/.local/share to the environment variable when it gets defined.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

I can't reproduce this issue. I have .desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications and they are presented in the menus correctly.

[Chris (chrisonbuntu)]

Hi Martin,

thanks for looking at this. when i run "sudo update-desktop-database -v" to refresh the database, it reports that:

"Search path is now: [/usr/local/share/applications, /usr/share/applications]"

Does it do the same on your machine?

I am happy to manually add the .local path to $XDG_DATA_DIRS as a workaround, but I dont know where it is defined - any ideas?

thanks
Chris

[Chris (chrisonbuntu)]

I have done more troubleshooting on this and found that .desktop files only work if they start with the line "#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open"

This isnt the case in Ubuntu Gnome and also in Peppermint.