I have about 15 designer connections in my local designer launcher with groups for different customers and applications. Because I’ve added these over time, they’re all jumbled and in no particular order which makes it mildly annoying to find. It would be nice if we could group and re-order and/or sort them alphabetically. I would group all designer connections by customer and/or by site (maybe a tiered approach is better than a simple single-layer grouping).
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I make desktop folders by customer and site with the correct command line. I only open the bare launchers to add new apps. The resulting .desktop file looks like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.1
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon=/home/philip/.ignition/clientlauncher-data/DesignerIcon.png
Name=Ignition-porthos80x
Path=/home/philip/designerlauncher/app
Exec=/home/philip/designerlauncher/app/designerlauncher.sh -Dapp.home=/home/philip/.ignition/clientlauncher-data -Dapplication=Ignition-porthos81x
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Bump for visibility - this seems like it would be a relatively easy add in the Designer Launcher and would be a great quality of life improvement. As an integrator with many customers and customers with multiple sites on top of my own development environments, my designer launcher list is a mess. Having the ability to sort the "My Designers" list with folders, and nested folders, would be a welcome improvement.
Even just being able to reorder items would be a huge improvement, without having to go to the json config file. I rename my connections now to include the customer, the site, the deployment type, and the gateway, and then I sort the list alphabetically, but I have to do that part with an external script 
Consider using the v8.3 launchers even for your v8.1 gateways. When it makes shortcuts, they are .designer files that you can organize in folders as you wish.
Use 8.3 launcher, and then just make everything favorites in your browser of choice. Structure at will. Mine is setup with 1 link for designer, 1 for the gateway for each system I need to work with. Multilevel folder structure to make it quick and easy to find what I want. And no need to ever open the designer launcher to configure a connection.
My only wish - 8.3 launcher could open 7.9 stuff.. then my life would be complete.. (and yes, I know Phil - I should get everyone off 7.9.. 
)
My opinion is a bit more nuanced:
If your client is running an isolated network, and is willing to run OS types/versions that don't break their old Ignition version, and isn't trying to add new features, I say "carry on".
That's basic economics for capital spending: operating software (Ignition counts) should live as long as the equipment it controls.
As soon as a client wants to change things to support anything new, a supported Ignition version is an absolute necessity.
That said, I have no clients still using any Ignition older than v8.1.
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