When installed without a full KDE environment (eg. on a primarily XFCE
system trying out different file managers), starting dolphin displays an
empty file area. Operations like "Properties" work, but incompletely:

This is not an issue of broken per-user configuration (I've obtained the
same results on a completely empty user account).

With the kinit process installed, we get a little further:

One error message on stdout (apart from endless series of
"QPixmap::scaled: Pixmap is a null pixmap" and "Request for unknown
property "X-KDE-Protocol") was

Running kbuildsycoca5 did not have any effect on dolphin behavior.

Continuing the search for the missing dependency, after installing kio,
`kshell5 dolphin` finally gives me a file list and directory sizes.
Still no folder icons, but at least basic usability without running full
KDE.

Please verify my findings (I'm not sure I eliminated all state between
the steps, especially in the area of kbuildsycoca5), and consider
modifying the dolphin package's dependencies to ensure it is usable when
installed without a full KDE setup.

Thank you
chrysn

Hello,

I can fully confirm the behaviour which chrysn describes.

Here, on a pure fluxbox system with only a few chosen KDE applications
(such as amarok, dolphin ...) I'm having the same problems with dolphin
as chrysn because of some missing dependencies (kinit, kio). However,
I'm still missing all file icons and every folder has to be opened by
double-click (and not by single-click).

On another system, where I have installed a full KDE environment and
fluxbox, dolphin shows the same behaviour under fluxbox as on the
fluxbox-only system. However, if I start dolphin in a terminal with

"XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=kde dolphin"

then all icons and single-click are back and dolphin behaves normally.

Best regards,
Marcus