I have looked around online and here and all the issues about brave opening a blank page from external links do not sovle my problem. And brave on version 1.74 and should be up to date as many closed issues saying its fied in new versions
On Fedora KDE or cinnamon (it just never worked), I cannot open anything from thunderbird links for instance. Firefox is fine
jounal reads nothing exciting
Jan 17 12:01:22 fedora.local brave-browser.desktop[27454]: Opening in existing browser session.
not sure what else to look at