Why does the .desktop icon won't work ?

[kabessao]

I thought of creating an Issue, but I'm unsure if this is a bug or not, so I apologize if I'm in the wrong place for this.

I've been using Nobara linux with Gnome for a long time and on it I would have Chatterino installed from flatpak, but then I saw how you guys added new features I really wanted for moderation, so I installed chatterino through distrobox using an arch image from aur. When I installed it I noticed that the desktop file wouldn't work the way it used to anymore. The pinned desktop on the task bar would show up properly, but when opening the application a type of "unkown" icon would show up for Chatterino with the name com.chatterino.. I thought nothing of it since I was using distrobox, so I attributed it to something to do with that and carried on. Now I've migrated to NixOS and I'm seeing the same thing again, and I'm unsure if this is a bug or not since I've been having this for more than 6 months and I found no issue about it on the issue tracker. Moreover, I know Gnome has it's quirks, so I haven't ruled out this being a Gnome specific issue.

So here's what I've investigated so far:

The icon shows up as com.chatterino. :

on Looking Glass it shows that it's WMClass is indeed com.chatterino. :

and I couldn't find a single instance of the text com.chatterino. on the source code ( which also makes me believe this is not a bug on chatterino ) :

Do you guys have any idea about what might cause this ?

[pajlada]

Without going into the issue too much, v2.5.2 is available through flatpak. Have you tried installing that?

[kabessao]

not recently, but I know that when I had the previous versions on flatpak the icon would indeed work correctly

[Wissididom]

The .desktop file works on Ubuntu. Since you said that distrobox uses the AUR I just looked at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&K=chatterino2 (haven't tested tho) and it seems like chatterino2-git has special .desktop handling in it's PKGBUILD, but not chatterino2-bin and chatterino2.
So my question would be which arch package you used? My guess would be that that package basically doesn't drop the .desktop file on the system 🤔

[Wissididom]

I don't know about distrobox or Nix, but the second screenshot is exactly what we have in the repository (See https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2/blob/master/resources/com.chatterino.chatterino.desktop)

My guess now would be that distrobox (or whatever is reading the desktop files) might not find the com.chatterino.chatterino icon. Maybe there needs to be something distrobox specific before the icon 🤔

[kabessao]

alright, so I changed the StartupWMClass on the arch .desktop to com.chatterino. and it it's working as expected now

I couldn't change the nixos one cause everything is read only in there, but I can apply a patch on the build process to do that out of the box

[Wissididom]

So you now have com.chatterino.chatterino as StartupWMClass or just com.chatterino.? If so, I guess we could test if it is worth changing or if it breaks other systems (Which I guess it does)

[kabessao]

I have set as com.chatterino.

[kabessao]

alright, since Nix easily allows you to modify the build process of the package I've made the following patch:

and added this to my nix configurations:

and now Chatterino shows up correctly:

[kabessao]

I think I might have found the cause of the issue. I'm glad I didn't open an issue tracker cause this is not a problem with chatterino, but with a build process with Nix, and somehow distrobox causes the same issue to occur. Something about the processes that make these run changes the wmclass from chatterino from chatterino to com.chatterino., which in turn doesn't get properly linked with the .desktop file.

Thank you both for the answers, I appreciate it.