A newbie helping newbies - Launch Firefox profile from shortcut.
I recently switched from Windows 10 to ZorrinOS (after a quick detour to NixOS… OOF) and in the course of setting things up how I like, I ran across some interesting stuff relating to flatpaks and shortcuts. I wanted to get this written to provide a resource for other people who might be switching.
This is a guide to making a shortcut to launch a particular Firefox profile, on a Ubuntu based distro, while running Firefox as a flatpak. This is just how I did it, put the files where you want.
- Make a directory to hold the launch script and a shortcut icon. My script:
<span style="color:#323232;">#!/bin/sh
</span><span style="color:#323232;">flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -p youtube
</span>
Obviously, make it executable.
Because Firefox is running as a flatpak we can’t just launch it using firefox. They’re actually stored in /var/lib/flatpak/app and can be launched like this.
opensource.com/…/launch-flatpaks-linux-terminal
- Create a text file in the Desktop directory with a
.desktopextension like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">[Desktop Entry]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Name=YouTube
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Comment= Launches Firefox Youtube profile
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Exec=/home/user/Documents/firefox-youtube/firefox-youtube.sh
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Icon=/home/user/Documents/firefox-youtube/youtube-app-icon.png
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Terminal=false
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Type=Application
</span>
www.baeldung.com/linux/desktop-entry-files
- Once saved, make it executable. Right click > “Allow Launching”. Done.
Just for fun, this is the image I like for it.