I run Kubuntu 22.04 LTS and have a strange issue. Dolphin is working fine as my file manager and set as default, but when I try to launch it via another application (e.g. "browse local files" in steam or "view destination folder" in qBittorrent) it won't launch.
It seems there's some problem with the system for launching the OS default file manager. When I attempt this, a blank icon appears in the taskbar (labelled WSLView) with a spinning circle, then disappears after a second or two.
Any ideas?
EDIT: I found the location of the application which was erroneously being launched and deleted it. i.e. I deleted wslview.desktop from usr/share/applications. that seems to have solved my problem.
hi! try this:
journalctl -f | grep --line-buffered kdeand then this:
journalctl -f | grep --line-buffered dolphinThese commands watch your system logs real-time for any mention of
kdeanddolphinrespectively. Try one and then the other or both at the same time, and then try to launch dolphin both normally and thru another application while the command is running, and post the outputs hereI'm not much of a KDE guy, but I've kind of run into a reverse problem where I'm trying to install Dolphin (the GameCube emulator) and end up with Dolphin (the file manager). This probably isn't what's causing your problem, but it would be funny if these programs are accidentally trying to start a GameCube emulator instead of the file manager.
As a Gnome user, Gnome has its own interface to set default applications. If I understand it correctly, these settings ultimately end up in dconf, which is kind of like the Windows registry - a hierarchical key-value store for program and system settings. Applications programmed with the GTK+ toolkit may be looking in dconf to decide which program to use as a browser or a file manager, instead of looking wherever KDE stores this information (
~/.config/mimeapps.listapparently). You can try messing around with it by installing dconf-editor (more lean) or gnome-settings (provided it doesn't pull most of gnome in as a dependency). With dconf-editor, take a look atorg/gnome/shell/favorite-apps. In gnome-settings, these options are located under "Default Applications."This might not be it either, but with several desktop environments and several frameworks, sometimes there are duplicate settings which do the same thing in different contexts. I feel like Gnome and KDE are both very much on the FreeDesktop bandwagon at this point and this shouldn't be the problem, but these programs might be trying to run Nautilus (Gnome's file manager), or something else and failing because it isn't installed / appropriate.
A quick web search indicates that WSLView is a command used when running in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (on Windows) which is supposed to open these files with the default apps specified on Windows.
This is a file viewer on WSL that allows you to open files and folders from WSL in Windows and a fake web browser that allows opening urls in your default browser on Windows 10.
In
~/.config/mimeapps.list, take a look for an entry starting withinode/directoryand see what it's set to. This should be your file browser. Likewise, look forx-scheme-handler/httpandx-scheme-handler/https. This should be your web browser. The names should reference desktop files (e.g.firefox-esr.desktop), not binaries (e.g./usr/bin/firefox). These can be found either in/usr/share/applications(for apps provided by the distribution) or~/local/share/applications(for apps you installed without admin privileges).Sorry for the long dump of random thoughts and red herrings.
This specifically probably isn't the problem (though I have run into this problem myself). Dolphin probably isn't installed as an AppImage (the thought of a distribution doing this makes me very distraught), and if the application trying to run Dolphin is already working otherwise, then the executable bit isn't what's stopping it.
but... AppImage (along with FlatPak and some other distro-agnostic package formats) often run in a somewhat sandboxed environment. This is good in theory, but these applications could often end up blind to certain configuration files, environment variables, and settings you've changed on your system, and do weird things as a result. I highly recommend not using these if the same package is included in the distribution. In my experience, the 'Software' application on Fedora mixes in the distribution packages and random AppImages in the search results and makes it very easy to install an AppImage when one isn't needed. The same may be true in Ubuntu (I haven't used it in a long time).
I still use AppImages here and there. There's nothing wrong with them. They just tend to be a "one size fits all" solution when there often are also "I'm running this specific setup and this package was made exactly for my setup" solutions available. This is especially noticeable on some distributions where the distributors go through great lengths integrating software, rather then just building it with the default settings and including the default configs. Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) notably does this, but since Ubuntu kind of became the "default" commercially supported distro, this doesn't get exposed much. Gentoo also does this, while ArchLinux notably makes very few changes to the software they package, leaving this as an exercise for the user. Other distributions fall in various places on the spectrum.
Can’t help cuz I’m a noob myself but Linux truly has so many little issues when you try to use it.
It is my main os, obviously, but it really does require some compromises and hardships lol.
Yeah I've been using Ubuntu for years and recently switched my gui to kde plasma. Sometimes things go wrong but I love we're actually able to fix them instead of just "reinstall lol" which ends up being the answer on windows usually.
