(Bug report) Trilium overwrites the local user desktop entry on start

[hollowshiroyuki]

Trilium Version

0.62.3

What operating system are you using?

Other Linux

What is your setup?

Local + server sync

Operating System Version

Archlinux (Linux 6.6.3-zen1-1-zen #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:40:39 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux)

Description

Trilium overwrites the .local/applications/trilium-desktop.local file each time it's started.

trilium/src/services/app_icon.js

Lines 46 to 48 in c35167f

	const desktopFilePath = path.resolve(desktopDir, "trilium-notes.desktop");
	fs.writeFile(desktopFilePath, getDesktopFileContent(), function (err) {

As Trilium doesn't automatically detect my Wayland environment, I'm forcing electron to use it with the --ozone-platform-hint=auto argument in the local desktop file.

I don't think overwriting this file is a correct behavior. The "default" desktop entry should be installed by the package manager inside /usr/share/applications and will be modified by updates since users should not modify this file themselves.

I also can't create another desktop entry with a different name, because Trilium will also create it's own entry anyway. Resulting in the app showing multiple times in launchers.

I understand Trilium is also distributed as a standalone executable so updating the desktop file may be required.

We could then imagine some solutions :

• A command line argument --overwrite-user-desktop-entry in the template file that users can remove to customize their own entry.
• A comment in the desktop file # Remove this comment to prevent Trilium from overwriting this file , and detect it before trying to overwrite.
• Only create the user desktop entry if a system desktop entry is not found.

As a workaround for now, I removed the write permission on the file. Symlinking trilium-notes.desktop to /dev/null and creating another desktop entry with a different name can work but launchers might display the system entry file if the user one is "broken".

Error logs

No error log to provide.

[zadam]

Hello, you can disable it in the config.ini:

[General]
# Disable automatically generating desktop icon
noDesktopIcon=true