This is a followup of JBIDE-25835 .

Recently a new feature was added - cdk can be downloaded directly from the IDE now.
As with other runtimes, there are two main paths you can take:
a) New Server -> Download
b) Preferences -> Runtime Detection -> Download

tl;dr: b) doesn't work properly with cdk because minishift binary is still not set after the download.

There is quite a big difference between a) and b). With a), you are adding a server manually and once your download is finished, the correct path is predefined for you. Runtime detection is not involved.
With b), the server is downloaded, extracted and then the path is added to runtime detection which is in turn run. This will result in the new server being detected and added.

Now cdk should theoretically support both of these paths. a) works - you're in the middle of adding a cdk server manually, you invoke the download and once that's done, the minishift binary field is filled properly for you.

But b) doesn't work properly for cdk, because runtime detection for cdk is built around your minishift home and not the minishift binary path. (I don't really know why that's the case, but I guess you had a good reason for it.) So when you do b), cdk binary is downloaded, but what's added to runtime detection is ~/.minishift (or $MINISHIFT_HOME if set). The result is that the cdk server adapter is added once the download is finished, but the minishift binary remains empty. So the usefulness of this feature is questionable.

Maybe you will say that there is no way to fix this. I hope you will at least agree that this is not ideal and b) doesn't really work properly right now.

I don't know what the proper solution for this is but let me start with a question: Wouldn't it make sense to change runtime detection of cdk so that it uses the minishift binary as the main path? What's stopping us from doing that?

Sorry for the lengthy description, I felt I needed to explain the whole context here.