The GNOME file manager doesn't always open for me

General Help
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1

I click on the file manager and the loading cursor shows but nothing happens. So to temporarily fix it I kill it in the terminal like so.

killall nautilus

It works again as normal but eventually the same thing happens again. Is there anyway I can fix this permanently? I came across this log here.

image

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Don't know if this is relevant:

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The default Nautilus Files ins 42.6 - higher than the one specified as vulnerable in your link.
It should be fine.

....according to Gnome.

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4

Thanks. Tried to narrow it down by just searching for "Why does File Manager crash at launch in Gnome."

5

Maybe a Reinstall helps. Open the Terminal and type sudo apt reinstall nautilus

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My Process of Finding the Answer

I tried sudo apt reinstall nautilus but that seemed to do nothing even after restarting. I then went on to try purging and reinstalling nautilus as after some point it would eventually give me this error when I tried launching it from the terminal.

Failed to register: Timeout was reached

So I ran these commands and then some weird bug happened when I restarted where my desktop environment defaulted to Kodi and I had no other desktop environments available.

sudo apt clean && sudo apt update

sudo apt purge nautilus && sudo apt install nautilus

Thankfully someone has encountered this problem before on an earlier version of Zorin OS and @Aravisian solved it right here.
https://forum.zorin.com/t/zorin-logs-into-kodi-de-instead-of-os/22452/4

I also upgraded my packages using sudo apt upgrade but it seems the same problem still persists so I started to dig a bit further and came across this to debug nautilus.

G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all nautilus

Which then gave me this log.

(org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): GLib-GIO-DEBUG: 16:03:13.997: _g_io_module_get_default: Found default implementation gvfs (GDaemonVfs) for ?gio-vfs?
(org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): Tracker-DEBUG: 16:03:14.006: Loading ontologies from database.
(org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): Tracker-DEBUG: 16:03:14.006: Applying ontologies from /usr/share/nautilus/ontology to existing database
(org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): Tracker-DEBUG: 16:03:14.007: Current and DB locales match: 'C'
** (org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): DEBUG: 16:03:14.008: *** Cancel Results Meta requests
Failed to register: Timeout was reached
(org.gnome.Nautilus:10374): Tracker-DEBUG: 16:03:39.032: Cleaning up stale resource URIs

Here's where I found the command and someone having the same issue as me though on another distribution.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2509

Seems to be an issue with tracker3 as the moment I ran tracker3 reset --filesystem nautilus opened up. I'm hoping this is a permanent solution. Will report back when I feel certain or the issue happens again.

Even after a reboot and using my file manager on and off for over an hour it seems like the issue is gone. Just run tracker3 reset --filesystem and if anyone else having the same issue as I did it should fix it.

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