Struggles launching Gramps from the terminal (command line interface)

Help User Manual
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Linux

As a new user to Linux, I find the file organization to be an experiment in obfuscation. There are so many alternative filepaths that I need a flowchart diagram on the wall to keep track of the paths I’ve already eliminated and those that have yet to be explored.

I’m sure there is logic to the madness. But for a new user, it is dizzying like being blind-folded and spun for a piñata game. And someone has a string tied to the Gramps application so that they can fiendishly gigle while yanking sub-directories to a new places should I blunder too close.

There’s got to be an easier way to discover in the GUI what installer was used to install Gramps and where the core code is located. (My system is complicated by having had different installers a several installations (and versions) of Gramps. So while I know which version is running (5.2.1), I do not recall the installer that was finally successful or understand which concurrently installed instance is dominant.

Fedora with Gnome

There is an icon when you press the Super (Windows) key. It can be at the bottom if Gramps is in your Favorites or at the top when you search by typing “Gramps”. The Gramps icon is also located in the Office category of the Applications overview.

I thought I could examine the underpinning of these icons to discover the path to the installation. But it is not that simple. The “Show details” context menu gives a hint if you understand how to interpret. It opens an “application store” like dialog. And under the buttons to Open or Update it gave a critical hint: this particular installation was using a Flatpak. So the method to find the installation is quite specific.

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Here’s Perplexity’s suggestion:
This summarizes of the process to find the terminal launch command for a Flatpak application like Gramps, when you know it appears in the GNOME application menu under Favorites and Office:

  1. Locate the .desktop file:
    find /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications -name "*gramps*.desktop"
  2. Examine the .desktop file contents:
    cat /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/org.gramps_project.Gramps.desktop
  3. Look for the Exec= line in the .desktop file:
    This line contains the full command used to launch the application.
  4. Identify the Flatpak application ID:
    Look for the X-Flatpak= line or the application ID in the Exec= line.
  5. Extract the simple launch command:
    The simple launch command is always in the format:
    flatpak run [application-id]
    In this case: flatpak run org.gramps_project.Gramps
  6. Note the full command (if needed):
    This is the entire Exec= line from the .desktop file, minus any file forwarding arguments.

By following these steps, you can find both the simple launch command and the full command for any Flatpak application in your GNOME menu. The simple launch command is usually sufficient for most purposes, while the full command can be useful if you need to specify particular options or troubleshoot issues.