I use Ubuntu 23.10 with VAAPI for hardware video decoding on my browsers. To enable hardware decoding in Chromium based browsers on Linux, you need to add command line parameters ("--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL). To make these permanent, you can put them at the end of lines starting with "Exec" in their .desktop files

This is straightforward enough, but the problem is, whenever there is a software update to any of these browsers, its .desktop file is overwritten so you have to do it again. After getting fed up with this, I decided to write this script.

Run it and it will ensure that any Exec lines in the listed desktop files that don't end in the required parameters will have them appended, Any that still do have them will be left alone. The updated file will be copied to ~/.local/share/applications where it will override the originally installed .desktop file. As it will be unaffected by subsequent updates, the VAAPI parameters will survive them, but sometimes icon paths etc are changed in updates, which would require this script to be re-run to take account of that.

The desktopFiles array should contain the full paths of all the browser desktop files you want to be able to keep the command line parameters on. Mine is :-

declare -a desktopFiles=("/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop"
                         "/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/chromium_chromium.desktop"
                         "/usr/share/applications/google-chrome-beta.desktop"
                         "/usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop"
                         "/usr/share/applications/microsoft-edge.desktop")

The params variable should be set to the parameters you want to ensure are appended to the Exec lines in the files. For VAAPI video decoding and encoding this is :-

params="--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL"

Run the script using your user account :-

./update-desktop-files.sh

Thats it!