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.

  • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I'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.list apparently). 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 at org/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 with inode/directory and see what it's set to. This should be your file browser. Likewise, look for x-scheme-handler/http and x-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.