wslu prevents from opening files and folders on some situations

[José Marinho]

With wslu installed, files and locations can't be opened from Gnome Activities View neither on Wayland session nor on Xorg one. The same happens when I try to go to a location from Places Status Indicator extension.In fact, I filed a bug some time ago against this extension, but that bug was expired. Now I found the reason for that bug so I create a bug report against the proper package.
The bug report against Places Status Indicator is this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell-extensions/+bug/1970181
I realized the cause of the bug in Places Status Indicator when I saw this thread: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/701579
Once I removed wslu from my system (on two different pc's) the problem with the extension has gone and I can open files and folders from Activities view.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Michel-Ekimia (michel.ekimia)]

Really important problem :

- WSLU is getting installed automatically as it satisfies www-browser ( which is kind of weird )

- Some gnome extension like DING fail to work , so you cannot open folders from your desktop

[José Marinho (jmarinho)]

The fact is I think that this package is not intended to be installed on a desktop system. But I don't know how this package ended up installed on my pc's because it wasn't my intention to have it installed.
I remember that, when I uninstalled from it my laptop it uninstalled gimp-help package too. I don't remember if it was the english or the spanish one but now, if I try to install or uninstall the gimp-help package or wslu, the dependencies between them seems not to be in place.
With that I try to say that perhaps, the best way to solve this problem is to prevent that wslu ended up installed on Ubuntu Desktop, because if I'm not wrong this software, according to its name, seems to be for using on Windows systems with WSL installed.

[Michel-Ekimia (michel.ekimia)]

it s because wslu provides www-browser ( like firefox or epiphany ) and gimp-help needs a browser

Kind of crazy

[Lem (lem-jjr)]

This situation affected me too (Ubuntu 22.04). I couldn't open any files from the GNOME Activities overview, and trying to open file paths from the Audacious playlist wouldn't work either. With wslu installed, the terminal output from Audacious read:

~$ audacious
Gtk-Message: 10:40:48.739: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
grep: /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/WSLInterop: No such file or directory
WSL Interopability is disabled. Please enable it before using WSL.
grep: /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/WSLInterop: No such file or directory
[error] WSL Interoperability is disabled. Please enable it before using WSL.
/usr/bin/wslview: line 216: /mnt/c/Windows/System32/reg.exe: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/wslview: line 308: [: -ge: unary operator expected
[error] This protocol is not supported before version 1903.

# apt remove wslu

Audacious now only reports:
Gtk-Message: 10:41:43.684: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

But the file browser opens as expected. And, files open from the Activities overview just fine.

[Michel-Ekimia (michel.ekimia)]

We really need to fix this , some more clients had the same problem after installing Gimp ...

[Mohegan (jack-mohegan)]

The bug is still present with Ubuntu 24.04. I can't open Nautilus from the places status indicator (gnome shell extension). I need to uninstall WSLU in order to work as expected !