Add a Snap Icon to the Desktop Ubuntu 16.04

How do I add a snap application (Notes) icon to the desktop?

The normal method of usr/shared/applications does not work for a snap application.
I have looked in the snap folder and could not find anything useful.

Solution 1:

Currently .desktops for snaps are located in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications

One can copy them out for use as a Desktop or in the case of Unity when running the snap just pin the icon that shows up in the launcher.

As far as snap icons in the unity launcher - atm if the snap has a .deb equivilant installed (vlc is one example) then the snap will use the .deb's icon. (improper behavior)

In those cases a new .desktop for the snap should be created in ~/.local/share/applications & on the Exec= line use a full path to the snap binary, this will differentiate the .desktop

Solution 2:

A simple permanent solution for all snap installations is to link your snap .desktop folder inside one of your user or system .desktop folders.

For administrators:

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ /usr/share/applications/snap 

For your user only:

ln -s /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ ~/.local/share/applications/snap

Confirmed to work instantly on Linux Mint.

Solution 3:

When I snap install blender, the .desktop file stayed in a /snap subdirectory. To make it work with gnome, I had to copy blender.desktop from /snap/blender/current/blender.desktop to /usr/share/applications (as root) and then all was fixed: blender shows in the gnome menus and nautilus associates it with .blend files.

Looks like some sort of crack between snaps and gnomes to me. Perhaps what we need is a snappy gnome (or is it a gnomey snap ;^).