GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 426190
Displaying Name and GenericName
Last modified: 2020-03-05 10:54:44 UTC
Right now, the main menu (as well as the application browser) show the launcher's Name= and the GenericName= values. What is the reason behind this? What you end up seeing is this: Banshee Music Player Music Player I would find using the Comment= value much better: Banshee Music Player Play and organize your music Adding to the problem is that many apps don't specify a GenericName at all. Perhaps the solution would be to fix all the .desktop files like this: Name=Banshee GenericName=Music Player Comment=Play and organize your music and then only show the GenericName field in the menus, or fall back to "$NAME $GENERICNAME" if there is more then one app with the same GenericName? Though I don't know if this works for all languages? Anyway, using Name and GenricName doesn't make much sense and it certainly doesn't make right now, were GNOME apps only use a generic name for Name= and 3rd party apps add the generic name to the Name= itself.
*** Bug 432096 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I have a patch in bug 426196 which allows you to set the GenericName from within alacarte and anywhere else the panel-ditem-editor method is implemented, which is most places ;) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426196 If this is applied then at least the data will exist, as its now exposed to the user.
I have to correct myself here. Sure, having Name and GenericName at the same time is a mess... right now. But this is not a main menu bug, it's the launchers that are broken: Name=Banshee Music Player GenericName=Music Player IMHO it should be Name=Banshee GenericName=Music Player which main menu displays correctly as Banshee Music Player right now. But sadly, the panel (traditional start menu) does not do the same... still, I think fixing this in panel (and the launchers) would make more sense.
This project is not under active development anymore; see https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/263 Hence reflecting reality and mass-closing all its remaining open tasks.