No one on earth has so far managed to get xdg default apps work on Linux. I've been failing since 19 years personally. If you've really succeded then congratulations!
I've only been using Linux for a few weeks but what am I missing here?
I set a bunch of mime types in `~/.config/mimeapps.list` which are assigned to desktop apps and they all open perfectly with `xdg-open` or when I launch them through a file manager.
It is documented in the XDG specification https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mime-apps/latest/file....
I’d have to look into your specific case but `gio mime` and `gio open` do the right things.
There are gotchas, for instance Chrom,{e,ium} insists on XDG_DESKTOP_DIR != XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR.
See this bug report from a confused user: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41076564
This isn't an XDG issue. It's a chromium engineers being silly pricks that think they know better than the power users who obviously went out of their way to create such a configuration. Also I bet it would work if you set your XDG_DESKTOP_DIR to ~/Download/