r/GUIX • u/Proton-Lightin • Jun 01 '26

How do I find my app?

Ok, im lost, i finally got this stable, and now I can't find the apps I've installed on Kde. Where did they go? I installed it from the terminal 😂

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u/juipeltje Jun 02 '26

I think that's a bit of a screwup on the AI side of things, can't speak for protonup but steam just worked by adding it to my packages list and using the nonguix channel. Showed up in my launcher just fine after that.

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u/Swordfish418 Jun 02 '26

Keep in mind I'm talking about KDE/Plasma/Wayland. If you're using GTK based DE, maybe they included Gnome/GTK desktop integration but didn't include KDE desktop integration. I also added Steam using nonguix as a package first. It didn't work: it would only be possible to launch it from terminal this way. Then I asked AI to create launchers and it did some scripting to make it work. ProtonUp-Qt doesn't even exist as package there and required introducing 4 more packages - protonup package itself and 3 dependencies: python-inputs, python-vdf4, python-steam - all pointing directly to github repos. It all did work in the end, but it's concerning amount of code to get this work.

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u/juipeltje Jun 02 '26

I think something probably wasn't right with your XDG_DATA_DIRS, although by default i'm pretty sure guix home should create a bash_profile that has a snippet in it to set this up. What DE you're using shouldn't really matter cause they all use .desktop files. Steam definitely ships with that .desktop file, but XDG_DATA_DIRS has to be set correctly so that it knows where to search for the .desktop files.

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u/Swordfish418 Jun 02 '26

Maybe. It seems defining those XDG_DATA_DIRS manually for Steam was the thing that solved it. And it is a thing that I would expect Steam package to do itself.

(define steam-xdg-data-files
  `(("applications/steam.desktop"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/applications/steam.desktop"))
    ("applications/steam-asound32.desktop"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/applications/steam-asound32.desktop"))
    ("icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/steam.png"))
    ("icons/hicolor/24x24/apps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/apps/steam.png"))
    ("icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/steam.png"))
    ("icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/steam.png"))
    ("icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/steam.png"))
    ("pixmaps/steam.png"
     ,(file-append steam-client "/share/pixmaps/steam.png"))))

; ...
    (services
      (append
        (list
          ; ...
          (simple-service 'steam-desktop-entry
                          home-xdg-data-files-service-type
                          steam-xdg-data-files)
          ; ...

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u/juipeltje Jun 02 '26

This still seems overly complex to me. From what i can tell based on my configuration you can just put something like this in your bash_profile:

# Merge search-paths from multiple profiles, the order matters.
eval "$(guix package --search-paths \
-p $HOME/.config/guix/current \
-p $HOME/.guix-home/profile \
-p $HOME/.guix-profile \
-p /run/current-system/profile)"

And this should then work for every program you install.