i’ve been annoyed for quite some time about receiving an error when trying to open downloaded files directly from chromium in ubuntu (using gnome classic). i’m not sure exactly when this function broke, but i’ve kind of just lived with it without looking into what the problem was. today, i finally got fed up enough and started googling. several forums pointed to uninstalling the exo-utils package which appears to be a core package of xfce. i’ve verified that this does indeed work. however, i’m sure i’ve probably broken xfce doing so (unverified).

there’s probably a less destructive solution out there, but i’m content with this for now as i won’t be switching over to xfce as my main DE until next ubuntu release.