I keep a large collection of music on a local file server and use DeaDBeeF for listening. I’ve never been able to pin DeadBeeF to the dock in Ubuntu, and it’s always had the ugly default icon.

I asked DeepSeek for help, and it turned out to be easier than I thought.

1. Create ~/.local/share/applications/deadbeef.desktop:

   [Desktop Entry]
   Name=DeadBeeF Music Player
   Comment=Music Player
   Exec=/home/user/Apps/deadbeef-1.9.6/deadbeef
   Icon=/home/user/Apps/deadbeef-1.9.6/deadbeef.png
   Terminal=false
   Type=Application
   Categories=AudioVideo;Player;
   

2. Make deadbeef.desktop executable:

   chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/deadbeef.desktop
   

And just like that, DeadBeeF has an icon and I can pin it to the dock.

.desktop files are part of the Freedesktop.org standards. They’re used in most popular desktop environments like GNOME, KDE and XFCE.

Tor Browser has the same issue, but it comes with a .desktop file already, so it only needs to by symlinked to the applications folder:

ln -s ~/Apps/tor-browser/start-tor-browser.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/