Clicking "Show details" in AO for Nautilus produces "Could not find 'nautilus.desktop'" error from gnome-software

[Wise Melon]

In the Activities Overview applications list, if I right-click on "Files" (AKA Nautilus) and select the "Show details" option gnome-software is launched but with the error of "Could not find 'nautilus.desktop'":

    gnome-software_Could_Not_Find_Nautilus-desktop.png

I am running Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 with GNOME 3.20.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I suspect this is related to the final lines of

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/nautilus/ubuntu/view/head:/debian/rules

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This is a bug with the Ubuntu-specific /usr/bin/pkg-gnome-compat-desktop-file from gnome-pkg-tools and affects all apps that use that script.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Jeremy, could you give some details on what's the issue with that script?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Seb, I believe the major problem is a logic error. /usr/bin/pkg-gnome-compat-desktop-file adds these fields to the .desktop files:

> file-roller.desktop (the compatibility .desktop)
X-AppStream-Ignore=true

> org.gnome.FileRoller.desktop ( the new upstream .desktop)
NoDisplay=true

Moving the AppStream-Ignore rule to the .desktop that has NoDisplay set fixes the GNOME Shell integration issue.

There's another smaller issue with the script, see bug 1623748 for that.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I looked at the status of this today in Ubuntu 18.04. GNOME Software has been updated so that it shows better results in this case instead of an error. (But it's still not perfect. Try gedit as the test case instead of nautilus.)

Seb Bacher suggested that gnome-shell is probably wrong for sending the old .desktop ID to gnome-software instead of the new one so I'm opening a gnome-shell task here.

We also discussed this general issue in the Ubuntu Desktop team today. We do not intend to drop the compatibility desktop files now for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS since they provide a useful service to upgrading Unity users. It looks like we will probably drop them in 18.10 though since they should no longer be needed then for GNOME or Unity.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 (xenial) reached end-of-life in April 2019.
Ubuntu 16.10 (yakkety) reached end-of-life on July 20, 2017.

https://ubuntugnome.org/ubuntu-gnome-16-04-lts-is-here/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuGNOME

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in.