[Solved] Problem sending .docx files on Whatsapp Web to Android/iOS users

General system
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Hello fellow endeavour OS users :smiley:
I’m loving this distro and my gnome setup so much that this is the first time I create an account to post on a forum and get help with something I don’t seem to find an answer to, so as not to just change the distro.

Long story short, I’m experiencing the exact same problem this user reported 1 year ago on Reddit: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1286432/lubuntu-20-04-problem-with-docx-file

The problem is that the .docx files I send over WhatsApp web to android/iOS users can’t be opened directly through WhatsApp (they have to manually look for the file in their internal storage), saying that there isn’t an application to open that specific type of file, despite actually having WPS or Office 365 android app. This doesn’t happen on my sister’s laptop, which has Fedora Cinnamon running on.

As the Reddit user mentioned, this sort of “corrupted” (notice the quotes) files are displayed with a greyish icon, while files that can be opened normally with a blue one. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks like on WhatsApp for android: https://i.imgur.com/jeOnrbj.png

I have already checked the mime types, and they are just fine. It happens on both, Wayland and X11. Perhaps there is a missing dependency? I remark once again that this doesn’t happen on fedora, but don’t want to switch and give up on EOS easily.

Finally, I might add that I use WPS Office, and my sister running fedora too. So the office suite isn’t the problem.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Solved!! It turns out the problem was in fact relying on WPS Office messing around with the mime types. My sister’s laptop running fedora didn’t encounter this issue because she is using the multilanguage snap version.

The solution is this:
" Well, actually the issue seem to be that WPS-Office is adding a ~/.local/share/mime/packages/Override.xml file and running update-mime-database

By deleting that file and adding common\do_not_detect_file_association_while_startup=true to ~/.config/Kingsoft/Office.conf and subsequently running sudo update-mime-database -V ~/.local/share/mime/ you can get rid of the bogus file association. "

Here’s the link of the post :wink:

Hope this helps more people like me in the future! :smiley:

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