Because distros don’t do it differently. Different DEs sometimes deviate from the established standards and practices. It’s not a distro change, it’s whatever weird little DE you use that decided to do something stupid.

That being said .desktop is a unified standard with unified documentation implemented in a fairly unified way across various DEs, with the only difference is some DEs support finding desktop files in some extra folder locations.

Every distro could maintain a complete list of popular DEs and a link to the documentation, or people could just look it up for the DEs they use and target. I agree there should, at this point in time, be some standard service to just call and handle desktop files that all DEs use that way application level developers can just call that same service and everything gets put everywhere it needs to be, but given the controversy of systemd, there’s not going to be a universal solution for that since this is absolutely not a kernel-level service that needs to happen.

Get in the timeout box.

😂👌