I believed it to be a Q4Wine bug and reported it there.
The whole point is that I tested it several times and found out that at the moment you install Q4Wine it creates several .desktop files under $HOME/.local/share/applications/q4wine/Default/system/ which will override some of the real corresponding commands in KRunner. These .desktop files refer to Wine builtin commands and programs such as winecfg and regedit.

So as long as you have Q4Wine installed that's no problem, but once you remove it KRunner will be referencing to dead .desktop files, preventing me from launching some of the commands either from the launcher or the search bar.

I reported it to Q4Wine cause I believe that there's no reason these files should be kept since they are going to be created anyhow for any installation of Q4Wine in any computer. The problem is that now I removed the files the entries keep showing up in KRunner and it somewhat knows the files aren't there, because now instead of seeing an error message regarding the missing Q4Wine binary at /usr/bin/q4wine, it shows me the content of the said file and asks me if I really want to launch it, as you can see below.


I made sure the file was actually deleted and performed several searches for any additional entries of these files but could not find any, which makes believe the file and it's contents are stored in a database.

In the end, I just don't get it, if this is a feature or a bug. I definetely want to believe it's a bug because I can't think of a use case where one would want to keep an entry for a file that doesn't exist in disk overriding real commands for real binaries in your system. But it's hard to believe it is a bug, since it even knows what was inside the file and prompts me asking if I really want to launch the program.

So please anyone tell me how to procees, because besides wanting to remove any of these entries (that now I realize are many, for many .desktop files that no longer exist) I would like to know if it is proper to file a bug report for this.

PS: Not all the commands are being overriden. For some of them you also see the green icon in the search bar with the command's name on it. But for others you'll see only the .desktop entry, disallowing me from any attempt of running the program, forcing me to launch it from a terminal emulator. But even when both entries are present it is still very annoying since pressing enter will try launching the faulty entry instead of the actual command.

Probably those *.desktop files are still cached. Did you run kbuildsycoca5 after you deleted them?

stevek wrote:Probably those *.desktop files are still cached. Did you run kbuildsycoca5 after you deleted them?

No, I didn't run this. In fact as I often leave the computer on for hours I didn't think that it would solve the problem if I rebooted the computer. So I turned the computer off and today when I turned it on everything was fine, which leads me to think it is - as you pointed out - that KDE still had the files in cache.

Anyways, problem solved, thanks for the attention.