I am on Fedora Linux 41.
I default file explorer is Dolphin I beleive. But I really like Files the gnome project. This has a nice preview which I believe uses libreoffice that is installed.
Funny enough, I changed the Default Applications File Manager to Files. However, when I use libreoffice and go to save a file, it opens up Dophin file manger to browse where I want to save my file.
I cannot find a way to change this behaviour. I tried another app installed to save a file, and again, from what I can see it is using Dophin to browse to save.
File picker dialogs are a little bit of a tricky thing under Linux sometimes, since applications may use different calls or libraries for those things.
In some cases, setting the GTK_USE_PORTAL environment variable to 1 can fix some of that, but I don’t have a way to test for your particular use case (I’m using KDE Plasma without many GNOME apps or components installed).
I tried to set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 from the command line, close libreoffice and tried to save a new doc and I keep getting Dolphin again. Thanks for the input.
It does seem a little tricky, and I found nothing online that helped.
I’m wondering if you may have to add it to the .desktop file for LibreOffice or add it to your shell’s startup file (say export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in .bashrc or .zshrc) and log out + log back in.
Don’t ever set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1; notably, that will break xdg-desktop-portal-gtk by causing it to itself use portals, recursively. This is possibly the most persistent bad Linux advice I’ve seen on the internet. Example consequence
To change this in most applications, you would need to remove xdg-desktop-portal-kde and installing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, but this is likely to have negative consequences so I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing so. It also won’t fix LibreOffice, since LibreOffice is using an in-process file chooser instead of the file chooser portal. For me, under GNOME, it uses a GTK file chooser, so LibreOffice must have its own special code to decide whether to display a GTK file chooser or a Qt file chooser.
In short, your question is really entirely specific to LibreOffice. Changing the default file manager application won’t have any effect on what file chooser other applications use, and it won’t affect your desktop’s the file chooser portal at all.
The file picker that LibreOffice uses depends on the desktop support that is installed. Yours is using either libreoffice-kf5 or libreoffice-kf6. libreoffice-gtk3 and libreoffice-gtk4 provide integration with gtk3 or 4. Removing the former and installing one of the latter will give you the GTK dialogs.
gstlouis@fedora:~$ sudo dnf install libreoffice-kf6
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Package "libreoffice-kf6-1:24.8.6.2-1.fc41.x86_64" is already installed.
Nothing to do.
gstlouis@fedora:~$ sudo dnf install libreoffice-kf5
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Package Arch Version Repository Size
Installing:
libreoffice-kf5 x86_64 1:24.8.6.2-1.fc41 updates 924.6 KiB
Transaction Summary:
Installing: 1 package
Total size of inbound packages is 287 KiB. Need to download 287 KiB.
After this operation, 925 KiB extra will be used (install 925 KiB, remove 0 B).
Is this ok [y/N]: n
Operation aborted by the user.
gstlouis@fedora:~$ sudo dnf remove libreoffice-kf6
Package Arch Version Repository Size
Removing:
libreoffice-kf6 x86_64 1:24.8.6.2-1.fc41 <unknown> 1.0 MiB
Transaction Summary:
Removing: 1 package
After this operation, 1 MiB will be freed (install 0 B, remove 1 MiB).
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Running transaction
[1/2] Prepare transaction 100% | 3.0 B/s | 1.0 B | 00m00s
[2/2] Removing libreoffice-kf6-1:24.8.6.2-1.fc41.x86_64 100% | 18.0 B/s | 8.0 B | 00m00s
Complete!
re-opened libreoffice and the interface doesn’t look exactly like what I’m used ot, but it has all my network drives etc like Files does that I’ve setup. So super! Thank you
I have noticed is that none of my browsers will open to a file manager anymore either in Downloads icon folder nothing would happen. I just tried that and its fixed so I am happy.
