I have moved on from Plasma but still use some KDE apps such as Dolphin file browser.
Without Plasma, Dolphin fails to retain file associations. I vaguely remember having to install something, perhaps ‘kde-runtime’? to fix this problem. I can’t find this in the CachyOS repository and I am not even sure that it is what fixed the problem.
Is this package still available and is this what I am missing to allow Dolphin to retain file associations?
Cheers
Should you not be asking this in the CachyOS forum? I mean they should know what they include and miss.
As far as i can tell the problem is distribution agnostic, the same file association feature doesn’t work on fedora either.
I think it is a framework or library that is included with Plasma that isn’t packaged with Dolphin, so I thought best to ask here.
Personally, I only ever had problems mixing up desktops and applications… it gets very messy, and it really does go against the Arch way (K.I.S.S).
It’s a classic problem… one that so many redditors insist doesn’t exist.
From EOs, I remember someone switched to i3, and had to update the MIME database, clear KSycoca cache… XDG-MENU-PREFIX and kbuildsycoca6, installing archlinux-xdg-menu.
Hyprland has it’s own set of issues.
This is interesting:
Sadly, you seem reluctant to give away too much information - which is interesting.
‘Fix my car, I won’t tell you what it is, but I moved on from the Toyota…’.
KDE Develops the environment for Plasma, and many parts rely on the system services - other environments bring other services (which might well overlap and clash)… kservice maybe missing, environment variables - which vary by WM…
I’m using CachyOS with the Niri window manager, I also have a laptop with Fedora and the Niri window manager. I fixed this on the laptop a month ago, I think installing the kde-runtime package is what fixed it, but it was a month or so ago and i tried several things, so I’m not sure. This package isn’t available in the CachyOS repository and I think the package has now been split into its components in later versions of plasma.
I vaguely remember having this same problem on a VM with Fedora with the Cosmic DE, which I also managed to fix, although this was last year sometime.
Hence i believe it is something that is packaged with plasma that Dolphin relies on.|
I figured this would be the best place to find a solution as it appears that it is an issue with Dolphin having a dependency/library that is provided by Plasma.
Generally I bang my head against a problem until it’s solved or I no longer have enough brain cells to remember what the problem was.
I appreciate any help.
Setting the environment variable XDG_MENU_PREFIX="kf5-", running kbuildsycoca6, and then launching Dolphin seems to resolve the issue.
This didn’t work for me.
I get the following notification when running kbuildsycoca6
running…“applications.menu” not found in QList(“/home/lucas/.config/menus”)
I tried creating a blank file in this location and running kbuildsycoca6 again and I get the same notification.
If you open a file does it present you with a blank dialaogue box prompting for you to enter which program you would like to open the file with?
If not, could you paste the contents of the following file so i can see if dolphin is just looking for a configuration from this file.
~/.config/menus/applications.menu
It is initially blank, but I can select/add the required application to set for the file type
AFAIR you need kde_cli_tools for this
I get this dialogue box but when i choose an application and select “Remember application”, the file opens but when i open a file of this type again I get the same blank dialogue box.
On my laptop this dialogue box has a list of applications to choose from, and when i choose “Remember application”, subsequently i am not prompted to choose a program again.
Yeah, that’s the same here, maybe should look into how the kde_cli_tools saves them?
EDIT: looks related?
kf.service.services: kservicefactory: unexpected object entry in ksycoca database (type= 306 )
I’m also interested in hte solution of this problem. I’m migrating from debian to arch. I use i3wm together with plasma. Everything works as expected on debian (I don’t even remember it there was a need to solve the problem and, if so, how I did it), but now on arch it appeared again - dolphin in i3 doesn’t let me to associate files with default programs
This has fixed the problem for me, specifically copying ./plasma-applications.menu to ~/.config/menus/applications.menu
I didn’t have to downgrade kservice5 or follow the other steps.
The dialogue box is now populated with applications and new program associations are remembered.
Thanks for the help!