After Updating Kali Linux, the Terminal Won’t Launch and Shows “Failed to launch preferred application for category”

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After updating Kali Linux, pressing Ctrl+Alt+t to launch the terminal started showing the following error.

Failed to launch preferred application for category

This time, I’m recording how I fixed the problem above.

Solution

I was able to resolve this issue by referring to this Stack Overflow post.

First, run the following command in the terminal.

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Then the following output appears, so choose an appropriate number.

There are 2 choices for the alternative x-terminal-emulator (providing /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator).

Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
0 /usr/bin/qterminal 40 auto mode
* 1 /usr/bin/mate-terminal.wrapper 35 manual mode
2 /usr/bin/qterminal 40 manual mode

Press <enter> to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 0

Finally, run the update with apt.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

This successfully fixed the issue in my environment.

What this did

Judging from this Stack Overflow post, this error can occur when there is a problem with a symbolic-link reference.

So, I used the update-alternatives command to reconfigure the symbolic link.

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Looking at the documentation below, you can see that update-alternatives is a command for maintaining the symbolic links that determine which application the OS uses by default.

Ubuntu Manpage: update-alternatives - maintain symbolic links determining default commands

On Kali using xfce5, it seems that either qterminal or mate-terminal is used for the default terminal, x-terminal-emulator.

In this case, I believe the problem was that, for some reason, no terminal was properly associated with x-terminal-emulator, which is what the shortcut key launches.
By the way, --config is an option that lists all available choices.

Summary

When this error first appeared, it felt like “my computer broke even though I didn’t do anything,” but in the end I learned quite a bit, so I’m glad I looked into it.