I get asked a decent number of times how to add desktop icons on Linux. Luckily it’s incredibly easy. It’s a freedesktop standard.

In fact the simplest file would follow the format:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Application Name
Exec=/path/to/executable -randomFlag
Icon=/optional/path/to/icon
Terminal=false
Type=Application

Once you have this saved to yourapplication.desktop move it to either /usr/share/applications if you want it system-wide or /home/user/.local/share/applications if you want it just for your user.