Programs in the start menu in wrong order when searching

When searching for things in the start menu, things get returned in a counter-intuitive way. Is this something I can fix?

Eg. When searching for ‘Display’, until I get to the ‘y’ at the end, the top suggestion for me is ‘Color’

Hello and welcome,

Just to gather more information, are you using the KDE spin? Haven’t used anything other than GNOME and XFCE so can’t identify the DE from the screenshot.

Hi spamot and welcome

This is Cinnamon.

The search algorithm is using keywords to show the relevant results.

In some cases, it’s obvious - both ‘Display’ itself and ‘System Info’, which if highlighted shows the description ‘Display system information’.

All the entries in the menu are actually .desktop files - (held in /usr/share/applications for the system and ~/.local/share/applications for an individual user). Some of the .desktop files have keywords specified, and ‘Color’ appears in the list you’ve got because its .desktop file (/usr/share/applications/cinnamon-color-panel.desktop) contains:

Keywords=Color;ICC;Profile;Calibrate;Printer;Display;

The order in which the search results appear is just alphabetical order, as they appear in the ‘All Applications’ menu itself.

Once you complete the search by typing ‘display’ in full, the algorithm is sensible enough to realize that there’s an actual entry called ‘Display’ and that’s likely what you want.