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Purpose

My intention is to create a firefox icon pinned to the dock that launches firefox in a personal profiles and is also indicated with a dot under the icon that launched it. (currently firefox launches the personal profile but the indicator still appears under the original firefox desktop entry)

What I Tried

I created a custom desktop entry for firefox and placed it in ~/.local/share/applications/firefox_custom.desktop

The entry is a copy of the desktop entry in /snap/firefox/current/firefox.desktop with the following modification:

  • Exec is changed to firefox --no-remote -P "Personal" --name FirefoxPersonal
  • Added StartupWMClass=FirefoxPersonal
  • Icon points to an alternative image (firefox icon edited with Gimp to be slightly different)

What I See

By following different questions and specs I expected to have the indicator (the little dot next the icon) to be on my new icon. But instead it appears on the original firefox.

When I check the wm_class for the window (with alt+f2 and typing lg), I see it's set to FirefoxPersonal, and yet it's not mapped correctly to the desktop icon that I set with StartupWMClass=FirefoxPersonal.

My Question(s)

  • What to change in my desktop entry to have it indicated separately on the desktop entry?
  • I also want to understand how are desktop entries get associated to the process/window they run? What's the process that happens behind the scenes when a process starts that eventually ends up with a dot indicator next to app icon of a specific desktop entry?
Tom Klino
  • 215

0 Answers0