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Installed the AUR Spotify client on my new Manjaro Linux system, started the app, tried to login - nothing happens. It is supposed to open a browser window where I enter my credentials, but that does not work.

First I switched from starting Spotify from the menu to starting it on the konsole. And add debug parameters:

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spotify --debug-level=8 --show-console

That produced the same result: no login pops up. But did not produce any useful debug messages.

Asked on Mastodon, and although I got useful questions and replies, it didn’t help. When I came back from my cycling tour in the afternoon, I took another look. xdg-open works, as expected. The extra/xdg-desktop-portal package is installed.

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xdg-open 'archlinux.org'

At some point I checked the proxy settings (previously I was running a local Squid on my Ubuntu laptop, but I switched this to a Pi-hole setup). And while the proxy configuration is fine, I spotted that KDE has no default browser set. That’s not how it is supposed to be, the user data is copied over from Ubuntu and I definitely had a default browser set before.

Dunno why this was not raising an error before, or caused trouble before. All other default applications are there, and I had the same browsers installed on Ubuntu. Anyway, time to set a default browser.

Set a default browser in KDE

Click on the “Other” setting next to “Web browser”, it will open a window with installed applications:

From there, either find your browser by browsing the categories, or type in the name into the search field:

Also tick the checkbox which says “Remember application association”. I’m using two browsers on all my systems: one where I have to login into applications, and one for regular surfing. Currently Firefox is the browser where I have all the logins, supported by a number of plugins. And Chrome is the other one, with even more privacy extensions and add-ons. Also all cookies are deleted once this browser closes. Let’s select Chrome here, and whatever other application wants to open a browser can use the “temporary browser”.

Selecting either Chrome or Firefox will raise a warning sign on the right side of the setting (not shown in this screenshot). Click on it, and confirm that this application can indeed handle x-scheme-handler/http and x-scheme-handler/https.

All done, it’s working now.

Login into Spotify

Clicking on the “Login” button in Spotify will now open a Chrome window and ask for credentials:

And once logged in:

Mime Types: .config/mimeapps.list

The file .config/mimeapps.list stores the list of currently configured applications for mime types (or media types):

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$ cat .config/mimeapps.list
[Added Associations]
x-scheme-handler/http=google-chrome.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/https=google-chrome.desktop;

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=google-chrome.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/https=google-chrome.desktop;

If one of these entries is missing, the system doesn’t know how to handle requests for opening a website.

Summary

Dunno, maybe KDE can warn if a handler for a request is not configured. I did not spot any kind of warning, notification or error message.