When I try to rename desktop icons (right click menu > properties), I get the following error:
Could not save properties due to insufficient write access to:
‘/home/user/Desktop/thing.desktop’.
(replacing my user and the thing I’m trying to name with user and thing)
Trying to rename by selecting the icon and pressing F2 lets me type the new name but does not save it. I’m running fully up-to-date Fedora KDE spin, what permissions would I need to give myself to solve this?
I remember there was a discussion of a similar issue in the past, that IIRC was fixed. Can you please share the exact version of Plasma you are running, possibly by pasting the output of the terminal command kinfo?
Here’s the output of kinfo:
Operating System: Fedora Linux 40
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.6.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.8.5-301.fc40.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 7640U w/ Radeon 760M Graphics
Memory: 14.9 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon 760M
To solve this types of permission problem, I use an alias.
alias iown='sudo chown -Rv "${UID:-"$(id -u)"}:${GROUPSB-"$(id -g)"}"'
put this line in .bashrc.
And just type iown damnfile.txt. Your user will get proper permission.
Failing to rename files is not a permission problem with the file - the missing permission is of the directory.
@GregKDE - what are the permissions of your desktop folder? If you haven’t changed the desktop configuration from the default, you can view it by opening Dolphin to your home directory, right clicking on “Desktop”, selecting Properties", and selecting the “permissions” tab.
You should have at least “Owner” set to " Can view & modify content" and under " Ownership" the " User" should be your user account.
Owner is set to view and modify content and the user is my account.
The user is correct and I have no other accounts. I have also tried changing the group to wheel and allowing the group to view and modify content, both individually and together, and that also did not work.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s an issue specific to fedora’s KDE spin because that’s the only distro I have used for a long time, and this has been an issue across multiple computers (Each one being a brand-new install from fedora Media Writer).
The “Group” field in that dialog is the group that owns the directory - changing it to a group that you are not a part of is a bad idea, changing to a group with special admin permissions is even a worse idea. The group should be your user account’s primary group - which should be either “users” or a user-specific single user group (the latter is common for Ubuntu based operating systems). You can check what is your primary by running, in a terminal, the command id $USER - the entry labeled gid is your primary group.
The only other things that I can think of that would prevent your from renaming files on your desktop are:
I’m not proficient enough with SELinux to know how to check that, except trying to run with SELinux disabled - to check if that solves the problem - by editing the file /etc/selinux/config and replacing the setting of SELINUX=enforcing to SELINUX=permissive - then rebooting.
