Unable to drag-and-drop on fedora KDE

Ask Fedora
1

Hello Fedora community !

I am relatively new to linux and fedora, had a bit of experience on debian and mint, and decided to try fedora 44 KDE on my desktop which was running windows a few weeks ago.
I have been loving it so far but I am encountering some issues…

The most handicapping issue I have encountered so far is that I am unable to drag an drop objects, files or tabs on my desktop. I can’t move around select text, files from dolphin, or even firefox tabs.
This issue stays even after rebooting

What could be the origin of this issue ? Is this related to wayland ?
(I only have a vague idea of what wayland does, so any explanation is welcome !)

I will be making other post regarding the other issues I am facing (super key not opening application launcher, no icons in login screen, …) when I solve this one, so stay tuned. :slight_smile:

Thank you for taking the time to read this !!!

P.S. : Blablabla english not first language blabla sorry for mistakes blablablabla

2

What hypervisor are you using?

For example VMware is known to have drag/drop issues when running with Wayland in a virtual machine. Their “hypervisor tools” integration was written for X11 and they haven’t updated them for Wayland sessions. Other hypervisors may have similar issues.

3

Hello Paul, thank you for your answer.

I think there was a misunderstanding : I am not running fedora in a virtual machine, but on it’s own partition.

Additional info : I have an nvidia GPU (and have the drivers installed), idk if that’s relevant or not…

Thanks again !!

4

Yes, I did misunderstand you - never mind…

5

So when you open a folder in Dolphin, for example, and drag an object onto the desktop, what happens? As an example, I’ve opened a directory and dragged the rust source directory onto the grey area to left of this screenshot (which is my desktop, for I have no imagination). When I let go I get the pop-up to say “do you want to move, copy or link this thing”… do you get ANY of that?

image
image1026×547 53.9 KB

Couple of quick questions:

  • Have you gone into KDE settings and double-checked that the Accessibility configuration is how you expect it to be?
  • Is this a laptop or a desktop? If it’s a laptop have you tried with an external mouse?
  • Does your mouse (or touchpad) actually register button clicks and drags as you would expect it to? (you can check this with sudo libinput debug-events - it’s a bit chatty, but you should see outputs when you move, click and release mouse buttons)
6

Hello Steve, thank you for your message !

So when you open a folder in Dolphin, for example, and drag an object onto the desktop, what happens?

The thing is actually I can’t even “pick up” and drag objects :frowning:
Here is a GIF to demonstrate. It might be hard to tell because nothing happens but I am trying to drag and move those files around…
but-nothing-happened

Have you gone into KDE settings and double-checked that the Accessibility configuration is how you expect it to be?

Yes, nothing out of the ordinary here.

Is this a laptop or a desktop?

It is a desktop with an external mouse. I have also tried with a different mouse but the issue stays…

Does your mouse actually register button clicks and drags ?

I have checked with libinput like you recommended and everything seems to be working fine for the mouse inputs.
However, I noticed that there is an unknown keyboard input that is constantly clicking an releasing. I will look into that…

Additional info : I cannot drag text, files, and other objects, but I am able to drag and move around tasks in my panel’s task manager.

Hope these infos are usefull, and thanks again for the help !

7

Right - the fact that in your video you can draw a selection box demonstrates that.

Definitely look into that!

8

If I had to put some money on it, this is going to be either related or the root cause. Sounds too weird not to be

9

Hello everyone, thanks again for the help!

I actually managed to fix the issue, and it was indeed related to that unknown keyboard input!

The device linked to event7 was spamming an unknown key every 20ms :

.
.
event7   KEYBOARD_KEY                 +1.064s  KEY_UNKNOWN (240) pressed
event7   KEYBOARD_KEY                 +1.066s  KEY_UNKNOWN (240) released
event7   KEYBOARD_KEY                 +1.084s  KEY_UNKNOWN (240) pressed
event7   KEYBOARD_KEY                 +1.086s  KEY_UNKNOWN (240) released
.
.

It turns out event7 is my SteelSeries Arctis 5 headset. The physical ChatMix dial was spamming the system with dummy keyboard clicks every millisecond because it’s not natively supported on Linux. I guess the spam was interrupting Wayland/KDE, which is why it couldn’t register when I was holding down the mouse to drag things…

To fix it, I blocked that specific phantom key using a udev rule:

  1. Created a file: sudo nano /etc/udev/hwdb.d/99-block-steelseries-dial.hwdb
  2. Added this code:
# SteelSeries Arctis 5 ChatMix Dial Spam Fix
evdev:input:b0003v1038p*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c0001=reserved
  1. Applied the changes:
sudo systemd-hwdb update
sudo udevadm trigger

This fixed my issue, even after reboot.
Thanks again for pointing me toward libinput, it saved the day! :smile:

10

Result! Well done for tracking that down - I was sitting here stumped!