chromium.desktop ships with unexpanded build placeholders, breaks GIO URL handling

[jbecherer]

System details

Dell Pro 14 Plus PB14250, Omarchy 3.3.3, Linux 6.18.3-arch1-1, Hyprland 0.53.1 (Wayland)

What's wrong?

Here is a ready-to-paste bug report you can submit verbatim. It’s written to be concise, technically precise, and immediately actionable for a maintainer.

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Title

chromium.desktop ships with unexpanded build placeholders, breaks GIO URL handling

Description

After a recent update on Omarchy (Arch-based, Hyprland), Chromium is installed with an invalid desktop file at:

/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop

The file contains unexpanded packaging placeholders, which makes it fail validation and causes GIO/GTK applications to reject Chromium as a URL handler. As a result, applications fall back to LibreOffice (or other handlers) when opening web links, even though XDG defaults are set correctly.

This is not user configuration; it is a packaging error.

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Evidence

Running:

desktop-file-validate /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop

Produces:

/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop: error: file contains line "@@EXTRA_DESKTOP_ENTRIES@@", which is not a comment, a group or an entry
/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop: error: (will be fatal in the future): value "...;@@URI_SCHEME@@" for key "MimeType" contains invalid MIME type "@@URI_SCHEME@@"

These placeholders should not be present in an installed .desktop file.

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Impact

• gio mime x-scheme-handler/http chromium.desktop fails with:

  gio: Failed to load info for handler “chromium.desktop”
  

• GTK applications (including LibreOffice) ignore Chromium and fall back to other handlers

• xdg-mime appears correct, but GIO rejects the desktop entry

• Users experience web links opening in LibreOffice instead of their browser

This primarily affects minimal/Wayland setups (Hyprland, no GNOME/KDE), where GIO and XDG are not auto-synchronized.

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Expected Behavior

/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop should:

• Contain no unexpanded placeholders

• Pass desktop-file-validate cleanly

• Be usable by GIO as a default handler for:

  • x-scheme-handler/http
  • x-scheme-handler/https
  • text/html

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Workaround (user-side)

Users can work around this by copying and fixing the desktop file manually:

cp /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
# remove @@EXTRA_DESKTOP_ENTRIES@@ and @@URI_SCHEME@@
desktop-file-validate ~/.local/share/applications/chromium.desktop

…but this should not be necessary.

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Requested Fix

Fix the Chromium package so that:

• All build-time placeholders are expanded
• The installed chromium.desktop validates cleanly
• GIO can load it without errors

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Environment

• Omarchy (Arch-based)
• Wayland / Hyprland
• Chromium from distribution repositories
• No custom desktop-file modifications

[dhh]

Don't know where this is coming from, but I don't think it's Omarchy. We've never had something like @@EXTRA_DESKTOP_ENTRIES@@ in our files. And now, with the next version, we're also just going to use the main Arch chromium package.

[scameronde]

Updated today and have a corrupt chromium.desktop file like described by the original poster.

I removed the package "omarchy-chromium" and reinstalled it, with no effect. It installs a broken chromium.desktop file with a lot of placeholders not being expanded.

[scameronde]

Update: I removed omarchy-chromium and installed omarchy-chromium-bin instead. Same broken chromium.desktop file.
I checked after uninstalling that chromium.desktop was gone, so it definately came from the installed package.

[dhh]

I did, my apologies. A new version has been released with this fixed. But you can also just switch back to the official chromium package, as we'll be going there in the next version of Omarchy.