Manjaro Kde Plasma Error Unknown Application Folder

Dec 14, 2017

It’s apparently a foolish idea to login as root from a file manager on Plasma KDE.

This was exactly what caused a number of problems, and among them, most notably, that I could not get past the login screen.

Of course, little did it matter that I installed any of the other display managers available and removed the current in use from the command line. I was still unable to get past the login screen.

In other words, it wasn’t just the usual login failed which indicates the wrong username and/or password. This was exactly the opposite, as after inputting the password for the system, since login automatically was disabled, the screen would fall back as if it loading the kernel again, and then without further ado, back into the login screen.

This feedback loop process was endless. I couldn’t but scourge on Google for some sort of information regarding the issue.

One of the first queries to Google was with the terms plasma kde fails to startx, although I knew that the last element of the query was not the most accurate. For one, because the X server was somehow running, or else how could I have a login screen in the first place. But almost unsurprisingly, the first result from Google was from the Arch Linux forum entitled Cannot start plasma 5.

I tried to follow one of the recommendations and modify the last line to

 exec startkde

but it made no difference.

Perhaps on other desktop environments the change on .xinitrc was a success, but at least on Manjaro Plasma KDE, all of it was failing and I was not able to get past the login screen.

For example, the suggestion to modify the .xinitrc on the xfce desktop environment have proven to succeed without any major problem.

See for example Can’t get past the login screen, where modifying the .xinitrc was more than enough to get it started.

At this point it was futile to modify any further the .xinitrc initialization file when moments before I had restarted the system, an error related to Plasma KDE had popped up on the screen:

A couple more errors from the main file manager Dolphin showed for example the following:

And also

At this point, after the infamous error with the kio_applicationsrc, I very well knew that the culprit of it all occurred when trying to login as root to Plasma from the Dolphin file manager.

Later on, after giving up the have Manjaro KDE running on the system, I found a few posts that spoke about logging in as root on the Plasma environment.

On the same post that for example was highlighted earlier, there is useful information as why running as root as KDE is altogether discouraged: