Info

mango version: 0.14.0-2

wlroots version: libwlroots-0.19.so

Description

Noctalia launcher cannot launch applications when running on mangowm 0.14.0.

Applications themselves are functional:

• Super+Enter keybind launches Alacritty correctly.
• gtk-launch works correctly.
• Applications can be launched manually from a terminal.

Only launcher activation is broken:

• Launcher opens normally.
• Search works normally.
• Pressing Enter on an application does nothing.
• Clicking an application does nothing.

After debugging, the issue appears to be in:

/etc/xdg/quickshell/noctalia-shell/Services/Compositor/MangoService.qml

Current implementation:

function spawn(command) {
    try {
        Quickshell.execDetached([
            "mmsg",
            "-s",
            "-d",
            "spawn_shell," + command.join(" ")
        ]);
    } catch (e) {
        Logger.e("MangoService", "Failed to spawn command:", e);
    }
}

Testing manually:

mmsg -s -d "spawn_shell,alacritty"

returns:

{"error":"unknown command"}

The current mmsg utility reports:

Usage: mmsg <command> [args...]
  get <type> ...
  watch <type> ...

and does not appear to support the spawn_shell command used by Noctalia.

Temporary workaround:

Replacing the function with:

function spawn(command) {
    try {
        Quickshell.execDetached(command);
    } catch (e) {
        Logger.e("MangoService", "Failed to spawn command:", e);
    }
}

restores launcher functionality immediately.

This appears to be a compatibility issue between Noctalia's MangoService backend and mangowm 0.14.0's current IPC/API.

quick background: this happend after i installed a few noctalia plugins, and then disabled every single plugin, and had chatgpt help me fix it, if anything is wrong yell at me in the comments