Proposal for launching standalone apps on Linux

One nagging issue Linux users often face is launching third party applications, that is, those that do not come from package repositories. As an example the Pitivi video editor provides daily bundles that you can just download and run . Starting it takes a surprising amount of effort and may require going to the command line (which is an absolute no-no if your target audience includes regular people).

This page outlines a simple, distro agnostic proposal for dealing with the problem. It is modelled after OSX application bundles (which are really just directories with some metadata) and only requires changes to file managers. It is also a requirement that the applications must be installable and runnable without any priviledge escalation (i.e. does not require root).

The core concept is an application bundle. The definition of an app bundle named foobar is a subdirectory named foobar.app which contains a file called foobar.desktop. There are no other requirements for the bundle and it may contain arbitrary files and directories.

When a file manager notices a directory that matches the above two requirements, and thus is a bundle, it must treat it as an application. This means the following:

• it must display it as an application using the icon specified in the desktop file rather than as a subdirectory
• when double clicked, it must launch the app as specified by the desktop file rather than showing the contents of the subdir

These two are the only requirements to get a working OSX-like app bundle going on Linux. There can of course be more integration, such as offering to install an app to ~/Applications when opening a zip file with an app bundle or registering the desktop file to the system wide application list (such as the dash on Ubuntu).