Occasionally you download some pre-compiled software. It can be a pain to remember where you put it, navigate there in a shell and run it.
Better would be if it were integrated with the desktop launchers so you can launch it like a regular program.
Information for this behaviour (like where the executable is, what the icon is, etc...) is defined by a .desktop
file, which has to be put in a directory the system monitors. See here for more details.
I was recently wanted to do this with Zotero, and their instructions had some recommendations on how to set this up properly: