I recently noticed that garuda-update was launching alacritty as a terminal instead of xfce4-terminal. In further looking into why this was, I noticed trying to remove alacritty was conflicted by garuda-gamer depending on it.
In my investiation, mainwindow.cpp · master · Garuda Linux / Applications / Garuda Gamer · GitLab uses /usr/lib/garuda/launch-terminal specifically to determine, from a list of possible x-terminals listed in an array, and ironically alacritty was first in line, however xfce4-terminal was available.
So, ultimately, garuda-gamer depends on garuda-libs which provides the actual script in question.
Furthermore, just further digging in, garuda-gamer suggests it also depends on xdg-util, and while I see no actual use of xdg at all in the code at first glance, this may need to be reviewed, just in case, despite xdg being commonly needed... Inaccurate dependancies are still inaccurate.
XDG is very common utility. The thing that determines what kind of file-type is present and what application should launch it is determined by xdg-open, a small util in xdg-utils. So, its okay to have that installed. If you don't want alacritty, you can always remove it by pacman -Rdc alacritty. that will also remove garuda-gamer though. btw, do you use the garuda gamer features? if not then it's fine removing it.
I think that is just a fallback terminal... in case any or all other terminals are uninstalled/removed, the alacritty terminal will be present and the scripts can be executed with it. even garuda assistant uses it.
Actually, no, it's not a fallback, it's the very first one used, as per garuda-libs I pointed out earlier. But, I'll be more specific. launch-terminal · master · Garuda Linux / Applications / Garuda Libraries · GitLab specifies an exact order from first to last, where alacritty is the first in the list which is why it started being used over xfce4-terminal with not just garuda-gamer, but garuda-update and anything that uses launch-terminal from garuda-libs.
I do use garuda-gamer, or at least did, to setup a few things, but I do not use, nor do I want to use, alacritty as a terminal, nor should it bring in a terminal it doesn't actually need when that's already done generally.
Ahhh, I think I know why it changed, too. garuda-libs was recently updated and the updated code is somehow failing to determine xfce4-terminal should be used. Package garuda-libs updated yesterday, today I started noticing alacritty terminal. That's why I discovered this problem.
Okay, I take it back. It is the first one. personally I like to use kitty, but I am not against using alacritty once in a while. I just changeTERM environment in ~/.profile to kitty and all the required apps use it.
Yeah. I'd rather it use xfce4-terminal as intended, however, also not depend on a terminal itself when it itself doesn't need it (garuda-gamer that is).
I primarily use tilix as my actual terminal, in a quake-style terminal visor. Though when a popup terminal is used for things like updates, I'd prefer keeping to XFCE stuff like xfce4-terminal.
elif [ "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" == "XFCE" ]; then
terminal=xfce4-terminal
What is your $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP?
Actually I was just looking into that as well, and, while I see it as XFCE in my own terminal, this may be stemming from the fact my default shell is zsh, and not bash, and why launch-terminal can’t see it.
Yep. Using bash provided that environment to both bash and zsh environments. My tilix quake terminal loads a login shell, and immediately attaches to tmux -2 a which itself specifically runs zsh for a shell by intentional design.
