Arch Linux User Repository

Please, don't ask for add lsb-release as dependency. In Arch Linux this package is not needed to run Slack Desktop.

And before asking for any other dependency as make or patch or whatever, please read the wiki.

I figured out the problem with the browser issue, Slack tries to xdg-open but the xdg-mime query (L827 of /usr/bin/xdg-open on my system) returns

/bin/sh: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en-US) brave-browser.desktop

Seems like some dingus at Slack decided to set the locale to "en-US" instead of "en_US" like all our locale.gen's support

The workaround is the same, just set the BROWSER manually, since xdg-open falls back to BROWSER if it can't find the correct *.desktop file to open the file (and it can't because the "warning" in the message above is part of the desktop filename returned, which obviously will fail to parse). xdg-open by default falls back to a few default web browsers if it can't find an app, L928-930 on my system:

    BROWSER=www-browser:links2:elinks:links:lynx:w3m
    if has_display; then
        BROWSER=x-www-browser:firefox:iceweasel:seamonkey:mozilla:epiphany:konqueror:chromium:chromium-browser:google-chrome:$BROWSER

This also explains why everybody saw firefox being used instead of their default browsers, or google-chrome. Not sure why this doesn't affect slack-electron...

Why is it called Beta ? So confusing, really sounds like the nightly-build, where in fact is the latest stable build ... confusing

Setting the browser environment variable to fix the Firefox link bug didn't work for me. The links still opened in Firefox and caused Firefox to crash for some reason. Uninstalling Firefox made Slack unable to open links at all. So I tried the slack-electron package thinking that maybe the Slack team just borked their bundled electron build. Sure enough, slack-electron opens links in google-chrome just like I wanted it to. Hope this helps someone else.

@goddva, thanks for the reply and workaround.

For someone who might need:

vim /usr/share/applications/slack.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
...
Exec=env BROWSER=brave /usr/bin/slack -s %U
....

@victortrac @Thornycrackers @lira - I had the same issue with Slack not using my default browser. A quick look of processing spawning, I do see that it uses xdg-open <URL>. But all my settings are correct, so it should open in Chrome... but no luck.

However, Slack do use the BROWSER environment variable if its set, so a BROWSER=google-chrome slack would be my workaround until it gets fixed, or I do have more time to see what really happens...

After the install, slack doesn't seem to launch at all - I'm not really sure how to proceed here. I tried installing 4.10.3, but that didn't launch on my system either!

EDIT: Deleted my ~/.config/slack then tried again - slack now launches

4.11.x broke the default browser for me too. I have the brave as my default and it was opening all the links in firefox. I downgraded to 4.10.3 and everything is working again.

@victortrac 4.11.x broke the default browser for me. I have Firefox as my default and it was opening all the links in chrome. I downgraded to 4.10.3 and everything is working again.

@doctorcolossus - I've had similar issues upgrading slack in the past. Wiping out ~/.config/Slack fixed it for me.