Bug#860796: appears to be linked to the lack of a running "nautilus --gapplication-service"

[Jason Crain]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 02:20:08PM +0100, Ben Green wrote:
> I do have KDE, mate and xfce4 installed. Having removed and purged KDE from
> my laptop, which shares the same issue, there's no difference.
> 
> There used to be a problem that clicking on a desktop file would launch
> dolphin. I've fixed this in the past by removing:
> 
> /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.dolphin.FileManager1.service
> 
> Though it's presence, tested through reboots, makes no difference to the
> current situation.
> 
> Here's a listing of /usr/share/dbus-1/services/ FWIW
> 
[snip]
> 
> I'll next try removing mate and xfce4 to see if that helps.

I think that if you remove org.mate.freedesktop.FileManager1.service,
that might fix it.  These all provide the org.freedesktop.FileManager1
dbus service and they might be interfering with each other.  Ideally KDE
would use dolphin, mate would use caja, and gnome would use nautilus,
but I don't know if there's a way to tell dbus to start different
services for different DEs.

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 02:28:19PM +0100, Ben Green wrote:
> having had a looking journalctl and /var/log/syslog, I note that there is no
> output produced when clicking desktop icons.

I'm surprised there's not at least something about dbus not being able
to start the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 service, or nautilus not being
able to show items.