sed is designed for editing streams - editing files is what ed is for! You can get consistent behavior on any UNIX platform with the above one-liner.

The printf command sends a series of editing commands to ed, each separated by a newline. In this case, the substitution command ,s/^Exec=[^ ]*/& -s/ is nearly the same as in sed, appending a space and a -s to the line starting with Exec=. The only difference is the comma at the beginning designating the lines to operate on. This is shorthand for 1,$, which tells ed to apply the command to the first through the last lines (i.e., the entire file). w tells ed to write the file, and q to quit.