A workaround for KDE Connect browsing bug

If you press "Browse device" on the KDE Connect tray icon and get the following error:

A folder named ~/.cache/kioexec/krun/<some_numbers>/ already exists.

In this post I will show you a simple workaround: open your file manager and browse to /run/user/<YOUR UID>/<YOUR DEVICE ID>/.

If you are unsure of your UID, try 1000, or issue id or echo $UID in the terminal.

YOUR DEVICE ID is a hexadecimal string and should be obvious when you get to the parent directory. In any case, you can find it out running kdeconnect-cli -l.

That’s it! Now you should see your device files, despite of the previous error.

So what happened?

Apparently, when you click “Browse device” , KDE Connect succeeds to mount the filesystem, but fails to bring your file manager to show it. When you browse to the mount path, everything is there.

The bug is already fixed upstream, so in the future a update from your chosen distro should deal with it. The system in which I see this issue is Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon, with Nemo file manager and KDE Connect 1.3.3.

In the meantime, you can use this workaround. Also, some people reported that installing Dolphin fixes the issue, so you might try it if it sounds appealing.