I'm looking to have both the RPM version and the Flatpak version of the same application installed at the same time, like Firefox. However, I'm experiencing an issue where the launcher shortcuts for these versions conflict with each other. When I try to launch the Flatpak version, it usually opens the RPM version instead. They don't appear to have distinct shortcuts in the application menu. Can anyone guide me on how to resolve this so that I can have separate shortcuts for each version, such as 'Firefox(Flatpak)' and 'Firefox(System)'? I'm using Fedora 43 with KDE Plasma.
2 Answers
I'm not as familiar with KDE, but in GNOME, you can create a separate .desktop launcher for each version. You just need to place them in the right directories, usually ~/local/share/applications/ for user-specific shortcuts or /usr/share/applications for system-wide ones. These .desktop files are basically text files that define where the app is located, what icon to use, and how it should be named. KDE likely has a similar feature! Start looking in those directories, and remember to use the user-specific one to preserve your settings after upgrades.
You might want to just keep the RPM version named as 'firefox' and change the Flatpak shortcut to 'firefox-flatpak'. That's a simple way I've found to distinguish between different versions of the same app. It totally works for me, especially when dealing with various package types.
Yeah, that's definitely the way to go!