Desktop icons do not update in GNOME after installing sysexts

[jlzhjp]

Hello! I've run into an issue where desktop icons aren't appearing in GNOME launcher after installing applications via sysexts.

After installing desktop apps, I can confirm that the .desktop files are successfully created. However, GNOME does not seem to detect the file changes in /usr/share/applications/. Because GNOME Wayland doesn't support hot restarts, I currently have to log out and log back in to make the new icons appear.

I tried following the Arch Wiki to manually update the database:

sudo update-desktop-database /usr/share/applications/

Running this returns the error: "The databases in [/usr/share/applications/] could not be updated.", likely due to the immutable /usr directory.

This behavior also causes issues when using sysexts-manager. During boot, the sysexts are sometimes loaded after I have already reached the desktop. Since GNOME doesn't detect the changes in /usr/share/applications/ dynamically, I have to re-login to see my application icons.

[travier]

Can you try creating the folder in /usr/local and updating it there?

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/applications
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/

[jlzhjp]

Can you try creating the folder in /usr/local and updating it there?

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/applications
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/

Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried it, but still need to re-login to see the icons.

[travier]

Can you try gtk-update-icon-cache? (and its gtk3/gtk4 variants?)

[jlzhjp]

I tried both sudo gtk-update-icon-cache and sudo gtk4-update-icon-cache, but it still isn't working. It seems that GNOME relies on detecting file system changes to update icons and doesn't provide a way to manually refresh them.

I wrote a quick script to test this, but systemd-sysext merge doesn't trigger a file system event. I don't know whether GNOME and Bun use the same method to detect changes, though.

Here's the script:

import { watch } from "node:fs";

const targetDir = "/usr/share/applications";

console.log(`Watching ${targetDir} for file changes...`);

const watcher = watch(
  targetDir,
  { persistent: true, recursive: false },
  (eventType, filename) => {
    const timestamp = new Date().toISOString();
    const name = filename ?? "<unknown>";
    console.log(`[${timestamp}] ${eventType}: ${name}`);
  },
);

watcher.on("error", (error) => {
  console.error(`Watcher error: ${error.message}`);
  process.exitCode = 1;
});

process.on("SIGINT", () => {
  console.log("\nStopping watcher.");
  watcher.close();
  process.exit(0);
});

When using systemd-sysext

sysext.webm

When using dnf

dnf.webm

[travier]

So I would start a discussion upstream as it looks like it would be difficult to work around that.