Fedora Minimal Clean Install Nautilus Doesn't Launch

User Support General
1

I have a Fedora minimal template with only Firefox, Nautilus, and a couple small others. I’ve installed nautilus and qubes-core-agent-nautilus (I don’t remember the exact names here, but I used salt and they’re installed).

File dialogues for handling and saving files don’t appear, Nautilus cannot be launched by normal menus (I have to use CLI), but everything works fine if I launch Nautilus manually, like the system suddenly remembers “Oh, wait, I was supposed to do something with this” I’ve narrowed it down to the .desktop file with ‘nautilus-autorun-software’ supposedly expecting a URI argument? I’m not sure why it would somehow work on normal templates and not minimal.

2

The minimal templates are intended only for advanced users. Most things will not work out-of-the-box, and you will have to fix them yourself. If you are not prepared to do a lot of reading, searching, learning, and troubleshooting, then you should instead stick to the standard templates, which are perfectly suitable for the vast majority of users. In particular, if you are new to Qubes, you should not attempt to use minimal templates until you have gained more experience.

3

Thanks, but I’ve been using minimal templates for a few years now, and I’ve read the docs. File explorer dialogues should appear after installing a file explorer, and nautilus should launch correctly once installed. I’m wondering if I (more likely) missed an extra helper package, or if this is a legit bug. This is mass installed, so fixing it manually isn’t an option.

4

This is a wild guess but maybe it tries to run with Wayland, while from a terminal it inherits variables telling it to use X.

5

That’s possible. I’m getting error codes:

$ nautilus-autorun-software
Unrecognized value "gl-disable". Try GDK_DEBUG=help
Unrecognized value "vulkan-disable". Try GDK_DEBUG=help
Usage: nautilus-autorun-software mount-uri

To clarify, there are two ways that Nautilus is getting launched: either just nautilus or nautilus-autorun-software, which is what the .desktop uses. I hadn’t really thought about the difference until now, assuming it was just some wrapper, but I think that’s where the problem is. I’ll look at docs.

6

You haven’t provided any details: template versions, making sure it works with normal ones, attempts to install other packages (zenith?), logs, what kind of outcome troubleshooting app menus gave you, etc.

7

It’s Fedora 42, to clarify. Normal templates work. I have not attempted to install any other packages; I haven’t found this error elsewhere in my search and so no idea which to test. I posted the error message when I got one, and there isn’t a problem with the app menus.

I’m now pretty certain it’s an issue with the nautilus-autorun-software, but I don’t know exactly what. Problems with GL and Vulkan shouldn’t cause issues, but maybe it’s indicative of X11/Wayland compatibility issues like Solene said?

8

I’m going to run an strace real quick.

9

Strace didn’t find anything of note, but I did figure out something. (I was stupid, it’s the org.gnome.Nautilus desktop file that I’m launching, a mistake made out of no sleep.) If I comment out the line in the desktop entry DBusActivatable=true or change it to false, then everything works fine.

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