No, I don’t think other platforms generate app icons, but on Windows and OSX, binaries are basically the apps, and it’s easy to create a shortcut that will run them (on Windows, you can even put the shortcut on the Start Menu, with categories, to avoid cluttering the desktop). Search speed and quality varies, but generally speaking they are capable to find a binary on your disk (maybe you must add itch.io’s download folder to some search list for it to work with some app launchers, but you only need to do this once). The .desktop file is really a Linux thing, and unless you got an AppImage or something equivalent, automatic wrapping as an app with icon + searchability is not trivial.

Also, note that my suggestion is not only for the Desktop. It is to generate a .desktop file with the proper settings, in order to:

1. have it detected by searchers and launchers for quick access
2. set the icon easily

In addition, itch.io devs could always add an option to let the user choose if they want to create a desktop icon or not (like most Windows installers, in fact; I think only Steam added icons to my desktop without asking!)

I personally mostly run apps via my custom launcher, which detects a variety of files, but still needs some .desktop to detect apps, just like Unity desktop’s own dash launcher (maybe some launchers can find binaries directly by name, but that also means they scan a lot of things and it’s more likely to find irrelevant binaries with similar name too). So, it is relevant even if you don’t keep a copy of the .desktop on your Desktop.

If you’re running games from terminal, then a quick access to itch’s game download folder is enough. However, the icon will only work if the developer distributed a binary that sets the app icon automatically (like Unity engine builds).

As a workaround, for now, if somebody knows about a tool that creates .desktop files easily, it would be great!

Alternatively, a centralized launcher (third-party) could do the trick. I tried Lutris with Steam + folders containing DRM-free games, and it worked nice! It scans apps/games from various folders and allows you to quickstart them from a simple interface. I don’t have it installed at the moment, but I probably will reinstall it and try it with itch.io this time. For now, I just launch itch.io desktop, but searching is not necessarily great (it’s hard to search by text among owned games, games downloaded but free so not technically owned, distinguish free/owned from non-owned games in collections, sort by play time, etc. as in Steam). And when I add some games from GOG or Steam, a centralized launcher will be worth it.