I've noticed a few times recently that drag and drop no longer works. I usdually use it when copying files from one files location to another, or from files into a browser upload area. Neither of these are working.
I've experienced it a few times recently, but didn't pursue it until now. Its become an annoyance.
Its the same behaviour in Wayland or in Xorg.
Thinking about it, I've only noticed this since the recent 17.3 update.
Whenever I see this type of issue I immediately think of Flatpak. Can you confirm if this only happens between specific programs that are installed as such?
That's odd. Put my old PCLinuxOS drive in the other day, wouldn't boot, then I remembered I reverted my graphics card from GT440 bacbk to GT1030. Booted in to Zorin then mounted and opened PCLinuxOS drive to find my Zorin menu icons and copied them to Zorin desktop no issue, and also moved my music collection from PCLinuxOS to music folder in Zorin (on Xorg I should add. I use App Image of Zen Browser. I wish distros would follow PCLOS Debian example of making zen browser available in synaptic package manager.
Pretty weird, indeed. You can try a few things to narrow down possible causes:
Launch Nautilus from the terminal with nautilus. This might print any errors right away when you start the drag & drop operation. Keep in mind that these are technically two separate operations for the file system, so you might see a message printed in either one of them.
Launch with elevated permissions with sudo nautilus. If this works fine there might be something wrong with your user configuration.
Install another file manager to test if the issue persists even there. For example, with Thunar:
sudo apt install thunar
Repeat steps 1 and 2 with it as well, in case the error does persist, to see if there are any relevant messages.
It's possible that errors aren't printed to the terminal but written to a log file directly. You can check for logs with journalctl -xe. Ideally, run this right after you experience the problem to make any possible log entries easier to find.
No errors reported, but the drag operation just selects over multiple files.
Aha - drag and drop working. Next step - where do we check on user configuration?
Thunar works, allowingh drag and drop to eg desktop but gave this warning:
(thunar:23245): thunar-WARNING **: 14:31:47.287: Name 'org.freedesktop.FileManager1' lost on the message dbus.
3b. sudo thunar, also allows drag and drop. No warning reported.
No errors reported in the log for either 1 or 2.
Thanks!
As I say, this is something which used to work. I haven't installed anything recently other than system updates.
So, with sudo nautilus it works, yes? what files do You want move from where to where? I ask because some Files can't be moved because of the File Path that is secured.
Not really sure what it could be but maybe a reinstall of Nautilus might do the trick. As always make sure to have backups of important files, and you might also want to hold on to Thunar for now just in case.
Hmm ... Okay, and when You make a right-click on a File, let's say in Your Pictures Folder and choose ''copy'' and then paste it in Your Documents Folder or the Desktop for Example, does this work or do You get an Error Message?
Thanks Aravisian.
OK, done that. No change. No errors reported.
The NAS, I can check tomorrow [its only on as needed, and its too late now]. I'm not concerned about that at the moment, if we can establish whats happening on this PC. Drag and drop used to work with the NAS as well as with all the places I ever tried it.
I created just my user account when I installed Zorin, supplying the password as required for sudo etc.
Thank you Aravisian for this and for your input earlier. Interesting, hopefully these incongruities will be solved as the headlong rush to Wayland continues.
I have to say though that I have used Wayland all the time since installing Zorin 17, and have experienced no incongruities, bugs or things that didn't work for me. Until this drag and drop issue, which as I say is the same behaviour on Xorg.
I guess I'll just put up with it for now. I am planning to install a second drive soon for Linux (dual-boot with windows at the moment on the same SSD) although I may wait until Zorin 18, possibly.
Another thought: I could perhaps install and switch to Nemo following one of the forum threads here. Or Thunar, since zenzen's suggestion to install that showed that it worked as expected.
Yes. i just meant that my general experience of Wayland has been positive - as a new Linux user.
Now, I thought to install nemo:
:~$ sudo apt install nemo
gives:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies.
xapp : Depends: libxapp1 (= 2.2.8-1) but 2.8.1+klbkjammy is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
I don't know if this may relate to my drag and drop issue?
or, how to resolve this.
I would not think so off hand - but you might check your sources, all the same. Have you added any other distro's repository at any point? Like POP OS or Mint...