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.

1. Make a directory to hold the launch script and a shortcut icon. My script:

#!/bin/sh
flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -p youtube

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.

https://opensource.com/article/21/5/launch-flatpaks-linux-terminal

2. Create a text file in the Desktop directory with a .desktop extension like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=YouTube
Comment= Launches Firefox Youtube profile
Exec=/home/user/Documents/firefox-youtube/firefox-youtube.sh
Icon=/home/user/Documents/firefox-youtube/youtube-app-icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/desktop-entry-files

3. Once saved, make it executable. Right click > “Allow Launching”. Done.

Just for fun, this is the image I like for it.