Not sure why I tried to do that. I knew when I did it that it wouldn’t work and I was kicking my self for being stupid when the prompt showed up asking me to confirm that I wanted to download to that location. My jaw hit the metaphorical floor!

Now I’m wondering what other neat tricks I’ve missed over the years!

To be clear this is in Firefox on NixOS with the KDE6 desktop environment. No clue if it works on other browsers, DEs, or OSs.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    I want all my programs all in one place, and all in the start menu, listed alphabetically. I want a center where I can push a button to update them, or mod them, or uninstall them, or even open them (if for some reason the start menu wasn’t working for some reason). I want it all in one centralized manager app. Call it whatever the fuck you want. But it should handle wine exe installs, flatpaks, sudo apt-get install, AppImages, and…sigh, yes, even snaps. If you can install it, this manager should handle it, including being able to click a checkbox that says “add to start menu”. You can uncheck it if for some reason you DON’T want a program on your start menu, but it should give you the option.

    Should it also handle RPM, pkgtool, pkgsrc, nixpkg, Portage, Homebrew, PyPI, NPM, CPAM, CLTN, CTAN, .jar, and software installed from source via ./configure; make; make install?

    On the other hand, instead of putting all the responsibility on the GNOME shell devs (and the devs of every other application launcher) to support every software packaging format under the sun, maybe it would be better to put the responsibility on the people packaging each application to conform to the Freedesktop.org desktop entry specification.

    I’m not saying your complaint isn’t valid, BTW. Linux’s lack of a central authority to dictate how things should work does inherently cause some problems that we basically just have to suck up and accept in the name of freedom.

    But the point I’m trying to make is that, while Linux may not do something the way you would expect coming from Windows, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t [try to] solve the problem in a different way. The more you can let go of your Windows-familiarity-based “intuition” of how things should work, the better off you’ll be.

    (Speaking of which: one reason you can’t find the equivalent of “Program Files” is that the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard collates programs’ files by type—executables go in bin, configuration files go in etc, and so on—instead of collating per application with all of its files together in a single directory. This has advantages and disadvantages that you may or may not care about, but one design isn’t necessarily clearly superior to the other in all cases.)