How to configure Linux to use the KDE file picker

It’s a beautiful day at the desktop, and there’s horrible GTK file picker.

Yes, I know that a lot of people use the Gnome desktop - some even claim to like it. As you might have figured by now, I don’t share that feeling.

Why, you ask? Well, let me tell you link to some people who share my frustration with this.

Looking into a fix

Now, can you somehow tell your system to use a better file picker? Yes¹.
Will all your installed applications respect this and use the file picker you want? Absolutely not¹!

Still, we can at least try to make things better for ourselves.

Configuring the system

1. Using your distro’s package manager, install the package xdg-desktop-portal-kde.
2. (Optional) If you are not actually using KDE Pasma, you need to edit
   /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/kde.portal and add the value of $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, separated by a semi-colon to the UseIn=KDE line (i.e.: UseIn=KDE;XFCE)
3. Adding the line GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 to ~/.pam_environment will tell GTK to always behave as if it were in an sandboxed environment.
4. Log out and back in to apply these changes.

Please remember that this will only work on some apps.

¹ As everyone using Linux knows, this is absolutely true and expected.