I’m running 18.04 prerelease and have installed some snaps such as PyCharm and Gogland. Their icons showed in the applications list to begin with, but have recently disappeared (I’m not sure if after an update or what).
I can’t find any .desktop files in ~/.local anymore.
Snapd doesn’t install the .desktop files into your home directory. Installed snaps’ .desktop files are located at /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/. That said, sometimes logging-out and back-in restores missing icons in the overlay, and other times if you’re currently running in a Wayland session then logging out and then into an Xorg session and then back to Wayland might restore them.
And the .desktop files in that directory are found because /var/lib/snapd/desktop is added to the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable.
This should be set up by /etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh. Maybe something has changed on your system preventing it from being sourced during login?
Thanks! Starting Xorg then back to Wayland fixed it.
Just rebooted and I’ve lost them again, so this seems to be a Wayland vs Xorg issue. Should I report it as a bug?
I just checked the bug tracker and it seems we don’t yet have it listed, even though it’s a known issue. It would be really helpful if you could file a bug for it at https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd
No worries! I’ll log it now.
thanks for the bug report 
