Do we need to use DBus to launch apps in the Task Manager?
When you click on a pinned Task Manager app, it launches the app using DBus. When you click on an app in Kickoff, it launches the app without DBus.
Normally the difference is invisible. However sometimes it's not. For months now I've been encountering an issue in my dev session whereby Elisa (and only Elisa) will not activate through DBus; clicking it in the Task Manager fails to launch the app and I see this notification:
However clicking it in Kickoff works.
David Edmundson sat down with me this summer and tried for an hour to fix it and was unable to. So it's not something dumb and obvious.
This is clearly an issue with DBus in my dev session as it does not reproduce in a distro provided session. It would also be fixed automatically once plasma-workspace!1715 is ready for merge. However that's not ready yet.
Outside of people having DBus broken on their systems, this isn't really a user-facing issue. So it's not a big deal, but it got me thinking: why are we using DBus activation in the Task Manager, but not Kickoff? What's the reason for this difference, and why aren't we doing the same thing in both places? Could we?