.desktop files don't display icons

I am using Ubuntu 20.04. I want to change some icons, so I opened /usr/share/applications to see the .desktop files for the installed applications. But the .desktop files don't display their icons (as shown in the screenshot), so I don't know which icons I should change.

How can I make the .desktop files display their icons?

1 Answer

If you know the name of the application, then you can try to find the right .desktop file by grepping a directory listing of where the files live, for example:

$ ls /usr/share/applications | grep -i calculator
org.gnome.Calculator.desktop

If you do not know the application, or the .desktop name has an unexpected name, then you could attempt locating the file based on the name indicated under the icon in the application overview with the find command, e.g.

$ find / -name '*.desktop' -exec grep -H Name=Calculator {} \; 2>/dev/null
/usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Calculator.desktop:Name=Calculator

This searches the contents of all .desktop files that contain the listed name as the Name= attribute.

These are ways to locate the .desktop launcher of which you want to change the icon.