I have installed the folder-color package from the Ubuntu repositories as well as the PPA, run the command nautilus -q, rebooted, changed themes (I use papirus-adapta-nokto but it doesn't work in ubuntu-mono-dark either, nor any of their analogs), rebooted, and repeatedly tried to change the color of a folder.

Simply put, the option to change the color is there; it just doesn't do anything! (?)

I am running Ubuntu 17.10 amd64 and using the Gnome Desktop Environment with Nautilus.

Edit: I have just clean-installed Ubuntu 18.04. Folder color still doesn't work at all.

1 Answer

tl;dr do sudo chown $USER:$USER /home/$USER/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/*

I have finally found an answer to this question!

I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu, then, when that didn't work, deleting configuration files from my home directory. Eventually, folder-color started working...

Until three days ago, when it stopped for no apparent reason.

This time, I read the source code. folder-color uses gio metadata to store folder custom icons, so I ran the gio info command on ~/Documents, and got this:

(gio info:15425): GVFS-WARNING **: 19:45:44.340: can't init metadata tree /home/$USER/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home: open: Permission denied

I then did ll ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home, and sure enough, it and two other files were owned by root.

Doing sudo chown $USER:$USER /home/$USER/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/* fixed all of those, and folder-color immediately began working again.

I can only guess that this happens when Nautilus is run as root (you shouldn't do that anyway :P).