Desktop Shortcuts Non-Functional

Help
1

I have encountered an error where desktop shortcuts no longer functioned.
It seems to be caused by the shortcut looking in the desktop for the application, even when it says it’s pointing to the right folder.

Screenshot_20240505_191801
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Trying to use a shortcut will cause a blank application to attempt to launch, and then close automatically. A similar issue occurred when trying to open the file manager from Steam with the ‘browse local files’ feature.
The file manager I use is Nemo.

2

Forgot to add this to the original post, but applications can still use the file manager to open a file, the issue is exclusive to file shortcuts.
file_open_display_functional

3

Is it possible to use relative file paths to get further up the file tree than Desktop?

Also, is this a .desktop link or a symbolic filesystem link?

4

What happens if you create a shortcut like: nemo (or files, whatever it’s called) path/to/folder ?

6

$PEBCAK

Look at the path which it points to… my shortcuts generally look like this:

Location: /home/ben/.local/share/applications

Otherwise (looking at Firefox here) it’ll be in:
/usr/share/applications

A Points to: entry indicates you dragged this around and probably deleted something later on.

If I drag an original, working launcher to the desktop and select ‘link here’ then I get an entry that says it points to the original one from which I created the link:

/home/ben/.local/share/applications/kitty.desktop

So you should simply delete that monstrosity of a shortcut, which you obviously created yourself.

Desktop should be in home… not home in desktop and desktop in home… you can create such paths if you like and put shortcuts in /home/aria/Desktop/home/programs/aria/home/Desktop/forked… but then you’ll just get laughed out of town when you get confused.