Creating ChromeOS Launcher Entries

ChromeOS will automatically examine /usr/share/applications and ~/.local/share/applications to look for .desktop file, which are used to define the applications that will appear on the ChromeOS application launcher. Most applications will automatically create an application launcher when the application is installed; however, packages installed as a binary or via AppImages may not create application launchers.

If you wish to pin an application to the ChromeOS shelf, it must have an application launcher.

If you wish to create an application launcher, you should create a file ending in .desktop in /usr/share/applications/ or ~/.local/share/applications/ using a text containing the sample text below as a base. If you intend to place your .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, you must do this with root permissions (sudo).

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Application Name
Exec=/usr/bin/binaryname
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/path/to/icon.png

You may change the Application Name to whatever you wish to identify your application. This will be what is displayed in the ChromeOS Application Launcher and will be searchable in the ChromeOS Omnibar. The Icon section should point to the .png file that you wish to use as the icon that will appear in the ChromeOS application launcher

The "Exec" line contains the command to launch the application, as an example, you can use "gedit %U" if you wish to launch the gedit text editor. You may also include any command line flags.

Manually Adjusting Application Scaling

ChromeOS does attempt to automatically scale Linux applications based on the recommended screen resolution on your device. This works well for users with screens that have 720p or 1080p display resolutions, and generally works well for users with higher resolution screens. Occasionally, some applications may need to be manually adjusted, this can be done by prepending a few arguments before the command to launch the application.

sommelier -X --scale=0.5 --dpi=160 applicationname

Sommelier is the way the Linux environment implements XWayland support and is responsible for rendering the application on your ChromeOS desktop interface. When an application is directly launched via the sommelier command, you can pass arguments to the application to change the scaling factor and dpi settings (dots per inch).

In the case of the scale argument, a larger number means the application will larger (more zoomed in) on the screen. A smaller number lower than 1 will allow more content to be displayed on the screen, which is often desired for video editing applications and graphic design software. A value of 0.5 for example works well for most IDEs, graphic design applications and video applications. A value of 0.3 works well for most productivity applications such as document editing suites.

You can edit the application launcher in /user/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications to add prepend the command to the start of the "Exec" command if you wish to always launch the application with these arguments from the ChromeOS Application Launcher.

As an example nano /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.gedit.desktop

Exec=gedit %U

Would become

Exec=sommelier -X --scale=0.5 --dpi=160 gedit %U