kate error message

[GreyGeek]

(No one has chimed in with the standard spiel here, so I will.)

Likely, what you did to cause this trouble was to run kate with sudo. Running GUI apps with plain sudo causes this kind of problem, so don't; use kdesudo instead.

This advice has had to be repeated so often on this forum that for a while one of the mods (or administrators or frequent posters maybe) had it in his or her signature in red and bold and caps, possibly even flashing, so don't feel bad about it.

True, see my post above

... IF you do run the app for the first time from your home account using sudo it will create an rc file as root. Ergo your problem. ...

[cadvanlei]

ah! should I also use kdesudo to install software from terminal then?

[elijathegold]

ah! should I also use kdesudo to install software from terminal then?

Well no. If you are running a terminal program then use sudo otherwise use kdesudo. For example both of these are fine: sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade and kdesudo kate, the latter I would normally run from krunner (Alt + F2) unless I was getting a strange error.

[whatthefunk]

Only use kdesudo for opening GUI apps from the terminal in root. For everything else in the terminal, use sudo.

[cadvanlei]

good to know. thanks everyone again for their support!

[Snowhog]

Only use kdesudo for opening GUI apps from the terminal in root. For everything else in the terminal, use sudo.

And by that we mean, use kdesudo app_name in a terminal "when" you need to use that application with elevated privileges (run the application "as root"). If you don't need those elevated privileges, then when launching a GUI application from the terminal just use the application name.

When in a terminal and you need to execute a command (not launch an application) with elevated privileges (execute the command "as root"), you use sudo command_name.

It is important you understand the difference, as launching an application in a terminal with sudo (sudo app_name) can result in unintended negative impacts to your user account.