Hello,
Sometimes when I want to start an app via its shortcut in Task manager in KDE Linux, it thinks for a little while, then doesn’t start. I have to click again and sometimes even three times before it starts.
It happens randomly and for several different apps, like Zen browser, Discover, System settings, Dolphin, Spotify, OnlyOffice, Steam, Konsole, you name it.
I have seen similar posts about Firefox, but those posts concerns only FireFox, mine any app.
what is the output of kinfo and are you using wayland or x11?
kinfo
kinfo
MESA-INTEL: warning: Haswell Vulkan support is incomplete
Operating System: KDE Linux 2025-09-18
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.19.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.16.7-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
Graphics Processor 2: Intel® HD Graphics 4600
Try launching the application from the terminal and wait. Maybe it just takes a long time to start?
I’ve tried to start from Konsole now and it starts immediately. Why doesn’t it start from the Task manager?
right click on the app menu and choose edit applications
find your application and look at the command line parameters it is using compared to the ones you are using to start the app in konsole and see if there isn’t some adjustments you need to make.
Yes, the command line parameters are ‘run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=launch-script.sh --file-forwarding app.zen_browser.zen @@u %u @@’
but to start it in Konsole terminal is ‘flatpak run app.zen_browser.zen’
The same with other applications installed via Discover and it is Flatpak, like KTorrent.
‘run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=ktorrent --file-forwarding org.kde.ktorrent @@u %U @@’
compared to ‘flatpak run org.kde.ktorrent’ which starts immediately with terminal.
What would be the next step?
i had this come up with a flapak just yesterday and i thought i was going crazy.
once i removed the --command=[value] pair it worked as normal again.
by my [value] was the same as the flatpak application name, and in your case it looks to be running a script first for some reason.
also i would keep the file name expansion variables at the end tho so it still passes the filename as intended when you do something like open with…