How to change file manager in XFCE from Thunar to Nemo

anperson222 · 2025-07-13 14:36:37

Hi, Relatively new here so I'm probably making an obvious mistake.

I am trying to change the default file manager in xfce4 from Thunar to Nemo.
I am running xOrg and am using ly as a display manager

I have changed the default file manager in the default applications settings
This is sufficient to get the files icon to launch Nemo

I have also changed the two lines in
~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml
To
<property name="Failsafe" type="empty">
<property name="Client3_Command" type="string" value="nemo"/>
and
<property name="FailsafeWayland" type="empty">
<property name="Client2_Command" type="string" value="nemo"/>

This should change all the desktop functions to use Nemo from what I understand
However here it does not work, everything in the DE still uses Thunar by default
On my laptop running Alpine this change works perfectly but here on Arch it does not

I'm not really clear on how this config file actually works so I'm probably missing something obvious

Screenshots included of the before and after in Settings Editor of what i changed
https://imgur.com/a/before-W8aOKDD
https://imgur.com/a/after-9zjlwLp

Last edited by anperson222 (2025-07-13 14:40:00)

seth · 2025-07-13 15:10:58

This should change all the desktop functions to use Nemo from what I understand
However here it does not work, everything in the DE still uses Thunar by default

Please don't paraphrase, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855
What specifically do you want to trigger nemo instead of thunar? What you changed looks like some session autostart configuration, so you'd start some nemo instead of the thunar daemon, the latter unlikely to show any window at all.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-07-13 14:36:37

How to change file manager in XFCE from Thunar to Nemo

#2 2025-07-13 15:10:58

Re: How to change file manager in XFCE from Thunar to Nemo

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