Dash + zeitgeist does not log use of KDE applications for 'Recently used'

[Rick Harris]

Using Saucy 13.10 and Trusty 14.04, when using KDE applications launched from the Dash, they do not show up as 'Recently used' neither in the Home or Applications lenses.

Seems zeitgeist or the information presented to it cannot get the path to the KDE application's *.desktop file.

Using 'konsole' as a KDE application example:

~ $ /usr/libexec/zeitgeist-fts --log-level=DEBUG
** (zeitgeist-fts:28799): DEBUG: zeitgeist-fts.vala:106: got insertion notification
** (zeitgeist-fts:28799): DEBUG: Indexing event with ID: 6382
** (zeitgeist-fts:28799): WARNING **: Unable to get info on application://konsole.desktop

This happens because 'konsole.desktop' resides in /usr/share/applications/kde4/konsole.desktop

If I symlink or copy 'konsole.desktop' to /usr/share/applications/konsole.desktop, then everything works as it should, zeitgeist index's the event correctly and Konsole shows under 'Recently used' for Home and Applications lenses.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Rick Harris (rickfharris)]

Still being hit with this bug on Trusty.

Some digging into zeitgeist's source shows that it gets the application info from the *.desktop file using glib's GDesktopAppInfo
https://developer.gnome.org/gio/2.33/gio-Desktop-file-based-GAppInfo.html#g-desktop-app-info-new

Reading the info from the above URL and using konsole.desktop again as the example, zeitgeist will only find konsole.desktop if it is renamed kde4-konsole.desktop.

Another solution is to create a symlink named /usr/share/kde4 that points to /usr/share/applications/kde4 and add /usr/share/kde4 to XDG_DATA_DIR desktop env. variable at login.

[Rick Harris (rickfharris)]

Bug still present in Xenial.

Creating symlinks as suggested in comment #2 has the unwanted side effect of creating duplicate entries for KDE applications in the Search and Applications lense.

So it would seem the proper fix would instead be for Unity to grab the path of where the konsole.desktop file resides, and if it is found to be in /usr/share/applications/kde4, then the desktop filename presented to zeitgeist should be changed from konsole.desktop to kde4-konsole.desktop

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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