Enhancements for displaying the software list in Linux

[carlesgs]

Hi Miguel,

here are two alternatives for creating the list of applications, regardless of the Linux distribution. Currently, using "dpkg" we obtain the name of the program through the name of the ".desktop" file.

Example: in the OpenUEM console, the name “kde-spectacle” is displayed because the file “kde-spectacle.desktop” exists in /usr/share/applications.

".desktop" files contain many parameters, and one of them can be useful to us: NAME. There are alternatives to NAME by language, NAME(es), NAME(ca), etc., but they are not relevant because not all ".desktop" files include these variants.

Alternatives:

1. find /usr/share/applications /usr/local/share/applications /opt /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications -name ‘*.desktop’ -exec grep -m 1 ‘^Name=’ {} ; | sed ‘s/^Name=//’ | sort --unique

This command searches the specified system paths for ".desktop" files and filters by the NAME parameter in programs from the distribution package, flatpak, snap, and in /opt (location for Google Chrome, Edge, etc.).

2. If the user uses, for example, plasma-discover or any other graphical software installation program that allows snap or flatpak packages only in user mode, that is, they are installed only for the user who installs that program, which is the case for desktop accessories such as Plasma KDE extensions, desktop themes, Gnome extensions, etc., we must create a script with the user paths using the $HOME variable. I have attached the script in bash.

list_system_apps.sh

In my opinion, although both options are valid, the first one, being simpler, reduces the complexity of the list.