One of the complaints about waydroid which I already mentioned when I wrote about Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) The thing was, the discontinued Windows proposal installed a cleaner subsystem than the Anbox evolution. WSA was activated and then you started adding apps; Waydroid installs and adds several default applications to the Start menu. If, like me, you also use the image with GApps, the situation gets even worse.
Every time Waydroid starts, the software It will check which applications are installed and add a .desktop file for each one. of them in ~ / .local / share / applicationsA solution is being discussed, but nothing has been finalized yet. These apps can't be uninstalled by default either, which affects our application menus. One might think, "Well, I'll just delete the .desktop files," and that might work... until Waydroid restarts.
Waydroid and its default apps: hide them from display
The solution lies in not giving in to our impulses (and here I was reminded of a Saw movie...). Knowing that the problem is in those .desktop files, our first thought is manual deletion. However, Waydroid performs a sort of scan of the folder every time it starts up, adding the applications it doesn't find. The solution? Make it find them, but in a modified form.
The trick is simple: add the text "NoDisplay=true" after "[Desktop Entry]". You can do this with any text editor, including those like nano or vim, but it's best to use a command to edit them all at once:
for file in ~/.local/share/applications/waydroid.*.desktop; do sed -i '/^\[Desktop Entry\]/a NoDisplay=true' "$file"; donated
The above states that "for each file in the ~/.local/share/applications folder that begins with waydroid. (lowercase) and ends with .desktop, add NoDisplay=true after [Desktop Entry]". And that's exactly what it will do. The Waydroid icon will remain visible because it starts with a capital letter. If we had any applications whose shortcut we wanted, we would then need to manually remove the line with NoDisplay=true and save the changes. If we change our minds and want to revert to the original state, we'll need to use this other command:
for file in ~/.local/share/applications/waydroid.*.desktop; do sed -i '/NoDisplay=true/d' "$file"; donated
What it does is remove the line NoDisplay=true from all files that begin with waydroid. and end with .desktop.
why it works
This works as we've explained. If we manually delete them, Waydroid will add them back on every startup. But if we modify them by adding that line, Waydroid will start, see that the shortcuts are there, and stop adding them. From now on, everything will be clean, except for the ~/.local/share/applicatinos folder, which will contain all the .desktop files. But this shouldn't matter too much to us.