Installing Applications in Ubuntu the Hard Way

I tried to install the Firefox Developer Edition on my Ubuntu laptop, because … well, I’m a developer, and it integrates some neat features. I also feel like the standard Firefox is sometimes very slow when loading development builds of websites and opening the debugger.

If you go to the Firefox Developer Edition website you get a huge download button which downloads a .tar.bz2 archive when clicked. I couldn’t find the app on the apt or snap repos, so that’s what I did.

tar -xvf firefox-118.0b8.tar.bz2

Extracting this gave me a folder including the firefox-bin executable file and a bunch of other stuff. Running that file with a shell opens the browser, sweet! But … wait a minute! Do I have to open a terminal and search that one file every time I want to start a browser window? And what about the dock? Right-clicking the app icon doesn’t show the “add to favorites” option, what’s going on?

Adding a Desktop Entry

When manually installing apps like this it seems to be necessary to add what’s called a “desktop entry”. If you want to go all nerd on this one, I recommend you read the official Desktop Entry specification. There are two places where those entries usually live at. The first is for the system-wide entries at /usr/local/share/applications, but in my case I wanted the local user configuration at $HOME/.local/share/applications since I installed the app in my home directory. I added a firefox-dev.desktop file in there with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Firefox Developer
GenericName=Firefox Developer Edition
Exec=/home/me/Applications/firefox/firefox-bin %u
Icon=/home/me/Applications/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
Terminal=false
Categories=Application;Network;X-Developer;
Comment=Firefox Developer Edition Web Browser.
StartupWMClass=firefox-aurora

It seems like you can’t use $HOME or ~ in the path. For me, it only worked after I’ve written out the full path explicitly.

/home/me/Applications/firefox is where I extracted the archive to. If the folder is at a different path, the entries for Exec and Icon have to be changed.

And that was finally all that’s necessary to set it up. Now, when using the quick-search in Ubuntu, Firefox Developer Edition shows up correctly. I can also finally add it to my apps-dock. Take that, Chrome!

Final thoughts

While it is quite easy to do when you’re an “advanced” Linux user (whatever that means), this stuff is incredibly hard to understand for beginners. I feel like in 2023 it should be much easier to install an application in Linux. I’m on Ubuntu 22.04, which is the latest official LTS version at the time of writing and I expected that adding a .desktop file to some ~/.local/share folder would not be necessary. I also expected to be able to use some easy to understand GUI tool for adding applications, especially when it includes executable and icon paths and odd things like a StartupWMClass. “Odd” because it would mess everything up if it’s not called exactly firefox-aurora for reasons unknown to me.

If there is an easier way, let me know. Maybe I just missed it somehow.

• Linux