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Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying!

They refuse since over a decade to implement some generic way to open the file-picker native to the running DE. They force their garbage usability on everybody, even people that would prefer not to use "anything Gnome". Same issue with CSDs, by the way.

Like I said: They can have their broken stuff at their place if they prefer it like that. But it's utterly antisocial to force that stuff on everybody without any opt-out possibility. They even actively and deliberately break and remove configuration options. That's just not OK.

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> As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying!

KDE has own sins as well - they removed ability of running Dolphin as root giving some vague arguments about security and users protection, while other DE allows running their file managers with highest rights without any walkarounds nor weird acrobatics. I've seen some Plasma addons restoring this feature but it seems it doesn't work on my Manjaro at all.

I like Thunar's method, giving a big yellow warning on the top of the window but not inhibiting the user outside of that.

This is, indeed, very annoying and obnoxious.

On the plus side, unlike many other FMs, Dolphin has a built-in terminal (hit F4) that's sync'd to whatever dir it's at, and you can `sudo` your operation there. xP

They were right, you should never run a GUI as root. The wrong part was not providing the alternative before blocking it. That maintainer left KDE IIRC, not sure why but I heard there were a lot of conflicts.

Last time I checked this feature was in progress by KDE devs, polkit or something like that, that allowed you to do that kind of operation without root.

But it was in a limbo because it was huge and hard to merge. They were trying again last time I checked. They would probably help you or anyone who would like that feature implemented to get started.

Somehow I feel pity for Gnome users. It reminds me of the early KDE 4 days, just that they seem to be stuck in this limbo for a much longer time. Gnome 3 was released in 2011...

You can actually fix that! Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in your environment and then basically all your GTK apps will use the platform file picker.

It works fine with Firefox for me since some time. But does it really work with all GTK apps? I would have to install some Gnome app to test.

Maybe someone else could confirm? This would be progress! (Even it uses some parts of Flatpak under the hood, which is less nice).

I'm a little bit skeptical as Firefox had to add support for the desktop-portal before it started to work.

No, the GTK application needs to explicitly add support for that feature, by using the newer GtkFileChooserNative API, introduced in GTK 3.20, instead of the older and more extensive GtkFileChooser API. In my experience it's still a complete hit and miss whether a GTK application supports native dialogs and of course you actually might loose some features with it, since the new API doesn't support everything of the old one.

I wouldn't really expect that the new API will ever be able to support all the features of the old one simply because the dbus API it farms out to has to be generic across all toolkits / DEs.

This is one of the reasons why I wish Falkon had more active development. Having a fully KDE native browser is so nice.

From a distance it looks like a personal preference thing: some people that prefer the KDE desktop environment might just prefer the GTK dialogs, controls or UI decisions made by certain GTK apps.

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