I'm using GNOME under Arch Linux. According to [freedesktop Menu Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html#paths) , .desktop files are under $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/. But when I was cleaning desktop entries today, I noticed that there's no /home//.local/share/ in $XDG_DATA_DIRS, but .desktop files under ~/.local/share/applications/ are shown in GNOME Launcher. Am I missing something important?

I'm currently writing a small systemd service that may need to shutdown the computer. I'd like to broadcast a message to all users, e.g. This computer is going to shutdown at XXX, don't forget save your work. For terminal users, I could use wall, but for users who don't have a terminal open, that's not an option. I know that all the users on this machine use X/Gnome, so they have a freedesktop notification client installed. However, it's not clear to me how I can use the system bus (?) to send freedesktop notifications. How can I do that?

According to my understanding of the [File Naming section](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s02.html) in the XDG Desktop Entry Specification, I should name my .desktop file following reverse-DNS notation: > The name of the desktop entry should follow the "reverse DNS" convention: it should start with a reversed DNS domain name controlled by the author of the application, in lower case. The domain name should be followed by the name of the application, which is conventionally written with words run together and initial capital letters (CamelCase). For example, if the owner of example.org writes "Foo Viewer", they might choose the name org.example.FooViewer, resulting in a file named org.example.FooViewer.desktop. Naming the desktop file this way and placing it in XDG_DATA_HOME/applications and then running xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate afterwards does indeed result in my application showing up in all the usual places.. except for gnome. For some reason, my application won't show up in the "Recommended Applications", Gnome's equivalent to the "Open with.." in other File Managers/Desktop Environments. The desktop is valid according to desktop-file-validate. After a quite a bit of digging, I came across recommendations to use another program, xdg-desktop-menu install to validate the file. When I did, it produced the following error: > xdg-desktop-menu: filename 'org.example.FooViewer.desktop' does not have a proper vendor prefix A vendor prefix consists of alpha characters ([a-zA-Z]) and is terminated with a dash ("-"). An example filename is 'example-org.example.FooViewer.desktop' Use --novendor to override or 'xdg-desktop-menu --manual' for additional info. When I tried this by removing the reverse DNS notation and just naming the file example-FooViewer.desktop, it finally showed up in gnome. Now I'm confused. Why is gnome breaking when I name my file according to the spec? Why does xdg-desktop-menu deny processing this file despite it conforming to the spec? Why is gnome NOT breaking for other similarly-named desktop entry files - all Flatpaks show up in gnome's "open with" menu despite their desktop entries being named in reverse-DNS notation and most not containing vendor prefixes or so much as a single dash! What is going on here? and how should I handle this conflict as an independent third-party packager? Am I missing something?

I have a couple of .desktop files that aren't working as expected or not at all. I can't see any error anywhere and asking for help on each one seems unproductive. Is there a way I can verify that I'm using the correct syntax in the file, that it complies with the FreeDesktop standard, so I can apply specific fixes?

I'm using KDE on last debian and i get a lot of problem with the menu. I was using the kdemenu to organise the start menu, but i get a lot of trouble : Some .desktop shows in the start menu but not in kdemenu Some .desktop shows in kdemenu but not in the startmenu under the good menu Some .desktop can only be called with the search option and show nowhere else (menu or kmenuedit) I first try to look at applications-kmenuedit.menu but it's a mess, there is some old change which are keep for no reason i understand. This a test directory i made, which i deleted, but is kept :

test
   
    
    a
   
   test.directory
   
    a
    a.directory

So, i wanted to create my own .menu file, inside ~/.config/menus/applications-merged/ keeping /etc/xdg and basic kde menu file :

menu
   
    _hidden
   
   
    _new
    
      AIMP.desktop
      arduino.desktop
    
   
   
    a
    
      arduino.desktop
    
   
   
    b
     
      c
     
     
      d
      
        LTspice2.desktop
      
     
    
      test.desktop
    
   
  
    chrome-aghbiahbpaijignceidepookljebhfak-Default.desktop
  
 
Education
Web Development
Translation
Science & Math

I get that problem : - Sometimes, the start menu refresh, sometimes it seems not. xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate --mode user change nothing - "Education" menu disappear but not "Science & Math" - Some .desktop are at the good place : arduino.desktop for example, but chrome[...].desktop don't show. I don't know why, maybe some interract with others .menu file. So i'm looking for a tool or verbose to know how xdg will construct the start menu and will be able to debug my .menu file by my own. Thanks in advance, Regards,

The default Firefox flatpak defines the following exec lines:

~ cat /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/org.mozilla.firefox.desktop | grep ^Exec
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox --file-forwarding org.mozilla.firefox @@u %u @@
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox --file-forwarding org.mozilla.firefox --new-window @@u %u @@
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox --file-forwarding org.mozilla.firefox --private-window @@u %u @@
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox org.mozilla.firefox --ProfileManager

I can't find the meaning of @@u and @@ in either the [Exec Key Spec](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/exec-variables.html) or the [Firefox Command line args](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions) . What is the meaning of these arguments?

Does the command line have a way to get a recommended list of programs used to open a particular file, based on the file type? For example, a .pdf file would have an open with... recommendation using the programs Evince and Document Viewer. I use the command line for most things, but sometimes I forget the name of a program that I want to use to open a particular type of file. BTW I am using Ubuntu 13.10. **pro-tip** Thanks to @slm 's selected answer below, I made the following bash script in a file called openwith.sh: xdg-mime query default $(xdg-mime query filetype $1) Add as an alias or execute directly as an openwith command.

This seems like a simple question that every application developer would have, but I can't find the answer. Per the latest [XDG Basedir Spec](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/basedir-spec/) , there are many directories that should be defined in environment variables. As one example: > There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific configuration files should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. Let's say my Bash script saves a user config - and I want to follow the XDG spec - How do I find $XDG_CONFIG_HOME? It makes sense that you would do something like

#!/bin/bash

# Print out $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
echo Your XDG_CONFIG_HOME is: [$XDG_CONFIG_HOME]

But running this on a fresh Ubuntu and Fedora Silverblue install both give the output:

$ ./test.sh
Your XDG_CONFIG_HOME is: []

Which seems totally useless, since that would mean on fresh desktop installs of Ubuntu and Fedora Silverblue, my app would write config files into the running directory. Yet, I can see so many applications properly putting the data in ~/.config/. Where are these apps finding the XDG environment variables, and how can I find them too?

Why am I seeing this message in my journalctl messages on Ubuntu?

google-chrome.desktop: [7405:7405:0127/124242.745221:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(576)] Failed to call method: org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActive: object_path= /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: This method is not part of the idle inhibition specification: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/idle-inhibit-spec/latest/ 

Is it possible to store the Firefox Primary Password (formerly known as the Master password) using the freedesktop secret service dbus API, in order to bypass the password prompt when Firefox starts and attempts to sync? If this were possible, the primary password would be stored in your local password manager (such as KWallet, gnome-keyring, KeePassXC, ...)."

I want to find the default handling application in my C program. Is there a C API with same functionality as xdg-mime query default mime-type on Linux?

The following command opens a file manager to show the directory.

-shell
dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.FileManager1 --print-reply \
 --type=method_call /org/freedesktop/FileManager1 \
 org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems array:string:"file:///path/to/your/directory" string:""

The problem is that the default file manager seems to be random. My guess is the last updated file manager, because it changed after a file manager was updated. Also, when a file manager is already running, it uses that file manager. Instead of letting dbus-send determine which file manager to use, if I know which file managers are installed, can I set a specific file manager, like Nemo?

Recently, I’ve tried to install nheko, a Matrix client, but I failed using it because it complains it cannot store password and other secrets because there are no providers for org.freedesktop.secrets available on my machine. Not knowing what that meant, I googled it, and found out it’s some standard API for a keyring, the example implementation being GNOME Keyring. Since I use neither Gnome nor KDE, I don’t really want to use software that’s supposed to integrate in these DE, so I looked for alternatives, and I found pass secret service, which is a provider for org.freedesktop.secrets using the GNU Pass backend, which is a good thing for me because I otherwise use pass as my password manager. I tried installing using it by enabling services.passSecretService system-wide, then rebooted. However, that didn’t work: nheko now complains that it timeouts when it tries to store things, and retrieving passwords using GNU Pass takes a significant amount of time. I suspect the issue is the following: - whenever my GPG key is required, the GPG agent tries to obtain the password, first by checking if it’s in the keyring, and resorting to pinentry (ie. a password-asking popup) otherwise - my GPG key is required both when trying to read and write in the password store using GNU Pass, because it has to uncipher the crypted passwords, and because when it writes something, it commits it to the underlying repo, which in turn tries sign the commit using the same key. - checking if a secret information is in the keyring requires reading the password store, since I’ve connected the keyring interface to the GNU Pass backend. That creates a cycle: whenever I need to get the password of my GPG key, it tries to query the keyring first, which in turn queries the password store, which in turns asks GPG the decipher its content, which in turn makes GPG try to get the password for the key, … This, I think, ends with a timeout, explaining why nheko fails with an error message about a timeout, and why the password store takes more time to retrieve the password: it just fails to get the password until the timeout occurs, and then it reverts to asking me for the password. How can I setup things properly to avoid these issues? Ideally, the solution would be not to put GPG key passwords in the keyring at all, if my understanding of the situation is correct.

I am trying to update the Gnome Web (org.gnome.Epiphany) flatpak, on Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (on WSL2). One specific resource, "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" always freezes when downloading. My internet connection is fine, and I can download other files/resources from Flathub fine, just not this one:

user@device:~$ sudo flatpak update org.gnome.Epiphany
[sudo] password for user:
Looking for updates…
Required runtime for org.gnome.Epiphany/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/46) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

        ID                                        Branch         Op        Remote         Download
 1. [—] org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264         2.4.1          i         flathub            1.0 kB / 976.5 kB
 2. [ ] org.gnome.Platform.Locale                 46             i         flathub        < 367.4 MB
 3. [ ] org.gnome.Platform                        46             i         flathub        < 346.3 MB
 4. [ ] org.gnome.Epiphany                        stable         u         flathub         < 11.6 MB

Installing 1/4… █▌                     8%

I have tried uninstalling, force-reinstalling, running flatpak repair, rebooting the system, switching wifi networks, using a VPN, everything I can think of. Is there any way I can find, either from the flatpak cli or somewhere online, the specific version of "org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264" it's trying to download and what URL it is being served from? I think I would be able to download it in a browser or using curl, or find a mirror repo or something, and manually install it from the file, but I don't know how to find that information. (Alternatively, if I found or compiled an up-to-date _.flatpak_ file for Gnome Web to do a manual offline install, would that include these other runtime packages bundled in it?)

Suppose I launch Firefox from my apps. Is the stdout and stderr redirected to a specific file or is it redirected to /dev/null? If it is indeed redirected to a specific file, I'd also like to know how to how to run applications from the terminal (e.g. nohup, & disown) without knowing where to redirect stdout and stdin. In other words, how would I tell the desktop to launch an app, instead of launching it from terminal myself as a detached process. Of course, if the redirection is to /dev/null, then nohup APP >/dev/null 2>&1 and & disown is sufficient.

I have this problem when I try to connect to the wifi. If I run resolvectl I get the following error:

resolvectl
Failed to get global data: Failed to execute program org.freedesktop.resolve1: Permission denied

How do I solve it?

I use sway on arch linux and a lot of apps log this error message:

org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidArgs: No such interface “org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser”

How can I resolve this issue ? Thank you for help PS: I use wayland + sway

I can't seem to create "Security" as a custom top-level Freedesktop category. (I have Sparky Linux with Openbox.) I did research and everyone agrees you can do it in three easy steps: 1. Create a security.menu file at /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/ 2. Create a security.directory file at /usr/share/desktop-directories/ 3. Create a appName.desktop file at ~/.local/share/applications/ After creating the three files, the appName.desktop entry does indeed appear in my jgmenu, but under an **Other** category and not the **Security** category I created. For whatever reason, the menu doesn't recognize my new category and just sticks my app in the Other category because it doesn't know what to do. I've double-checked the .menu and .directory files multiple times, and I'm formatting them as I should. (contents of both appear below) Is there anything else I should be doing? **security.menu** > "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu-spec/menu-1.0.dtd "> > > Applications > > Security > security.directory > > > Security > > > > **security.directory** > [Desktop Entry] > Type=Directory > Encoding=UTF-8 > Name=Security > Icon=org.gnome.dspy

Searching, googling, I could not find any information about file types recognized by file. For example, an *.mp4 file is identified as "ISO Media" (while being able to play with VLC normally). This is not 100% clear, it somehow leaves me to wonder whether it's a correct detection or the file is confused for ISO image. (Either because e.g. the sample is somehow corrupted, or, just that the algorithm is not 100% accurate for all types.) My problem is that I need to set up some rules for switching based on file type. I have set created a sample file set, but I cannot collect enough samples of all types which I need to be recognized by my code. And the real set will probably be really huge. It would be enough for me if I could read some comments to use as a reference to those types which are not so obvious. But to my surprise, I could not find any useful information. Most of my searches ended on magic file format specification, which is not really helpful to me. I'm interested in *the* magic file which is distributed with, say, Debian.

I can't find a way to find what program implements the org.freedesktop.Notifications service. Is it possible to ask DBus to tell me what program provides it? The reason for asking this question is quite banal: I found a new desktop notifications daemon I'd like to use, but it won't start and instead complains with this message > Name Lost. Is Another notification daemon running? However, I am unable to determine what program *is* holding the name. I already uninstalled every other notification daemon, restarted X server, and even rebooted the machine. However, when I run this command: dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus --type=method_call \ --print-reply /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames string "org.freedesktop.Notifications" is present in the output, so *something* is holding the name, and I can't start my desired daemon.