One of our readers commented this statement few days ago, and I tend to agree with him/her to a point. The commenter posted ‘adding program shortcuts to the desktop in Ubuntu sucks’.

Do you agree or not? All I will say is it sucks sometimes for new users. Other popular operating systems allows for one to quickly add a program icon on the desktop by dragging it there easily using the mouse. That’s how its supposed to be. That easy!

In Ubuntu or other Linux systems, it’s a different story at times. Just dragging a program icon on the desktop works for some programs but not all. For instance, if you drag LibreOffice Writer icon from Dash to your desktop in Ubuntu, a shortcut will be created but owned by the root user. Why is that?

And if you double-click it to launch it, you’ll get the following error message

“The application launcher ‘writer.desktop’ has not been marked as trusted. If you do not know the source of the file, launching it may be unsafe”

That’s not cool. This is not what new users want. New users want to use these features without running commands. To fix this in Ubuntu, one must run the below commands.

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/*.desktop

 

Then take ownership of the icons by running the commands below.

sudo chown username ~/Desktop/*.desktop

Replace username with your account name.

 

Restart or log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

 

 

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