GIMP Debugging dialog with ultra weird stack-trace at startup

rubisetcie · July 20, 2025, 9:46am

Hello everyone.

Everytime I open GIMP 3.1.2 on my Debian Linux, I am greeted with a “debugging dialog” that tells me to “Copy-paste this whole debug data to report to developers” (understandable).

The problem is that the “debug data” doesn’t even remotely seems to be related to GIMP: it mentions things like Error loading .desktop file at /usr/local/share/applications/vmware-player.desktop and various kernel warnings…

Thus, my questions are:

From where does GIMP sources these “debugging data”?
How to fix them?

I precise VMWare is a program I have installed, then uninstalled before doing a system upgrade. I haven’t reinstalled it yet… I dunno why GIMP cares about this .desktop file.

Full debugging data copy-and-pasted:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/RubisetCie/dd24023d457890f3d8bbd5baaadbc744

gistfile1.txt

<!-- Copy-paste this whole debug data to report to developers -->


```
Éditeur d’image GIMP version 3.1.2
git-describe: GIMP_3_1_2
Build: rubisetcie rev 0 for linux
# C compiler #
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=/usr/bin/cc

This file has been truncated. show original

cmyk.student · July 20, 2025, 5:22pm

Hi! We do have a plug-in that tries to open .desktop files to see if they link to an image: plug-ins/common/file-desktop-link.c · master · GNOME / GIMP · GitLab

I’m guessing the vmware-player.desktop link ended up in your history, GIMP tries to load it on open, and then because the plug-in is apparently not robust enough, it throws an error. We’ll need to look into it.

rubisetcie · July 20, 2025, 7:55pm

Thank you, indeed this seems like a promising lead, however I tried to delete my ~/.config/GIMP and ~/.cache/gimp, and the problem still appears…

Would you have something specific location for this history?

BTW, I tried running a grep -F vmware -r ~, and it found nothing…

rubisetcie · July 21, 2025, 10:02am

I solved the problem eventually, although grep -F vmware -r didn’t work, find / -name '*vmware*' yielded interesting results, there was a leftover desktop file of VMWare.

Deleting them got rid of the debugging dialog.

cmyk.student · July 21, 2025, 6:28pm

Glad you got it fixed! That said, we should still review our file-desktop plug-in to prevent it from causing problems on non-image shortcuts. Thanks for bringing it up!