This path uses ~/.applications, but the readme references ~/applications.

It should be the same, or better yet, tell the user to adjust their path themselves. They can't use the provided desktop file anyway unless their home-dir happens to be username.

I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this. I'm looking at the XDG spec and it's not entirely clear to me whether or not a variable like $USER is allowed, which would circumvent this issue.

The Spec says that $ is a reserved character and therefore needs to be quoted, which would lead me to believe that using a variable would work, but it doesn't explicitly say whether or not they are allowed.

However, I know from experience that KDE at least has no issue with this and takes pretty much whatever you throw at it, but desktop-file-validate vomits errors over it:

❯ head ~/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop -n3             
[Desktop Action open-from-clipboard]
Exec=mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- "$(xsel -ob)"
Name=Open Clipboard URL

      ~                                                                                            at 06:37:04   
❯ desktop-file-validate ~/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop
/home/tarulia/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop: error: first group is not "Desktop Entry"
/home/tarulia/.local/share/applications/mpv.desktop: error: value "mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- "$(xsel -ob)"" for key "Exec" in group "Desktop Action open-from-clipboard" contains a non-escaped character '$' in a quote, but it should be escaped with two backslashes ("\\$")

When I do escape the $, this doesn't work anymore, so that would indicate it's not allowed.

But then again, this whole thing also doesn't work when I fix the second error it complains about so... probably just quirky KDE behaviour that is maybe technically a bug that helps me.

As discussed on Discord before if we wanted a "ready to go" type of desktop file I don't see a way around a shell script that downloads the AppImage and writes a desktop file from scratch (or from a template), inserting the username, possibly giving users the option to provide their own directory (for example my AppImages are in ~/Applications, not ~/applications or ~/.applications), and the option to use the wayland-native switches.

The readme would then just have a curl <link> | sh in it.