Getting Started step 50: footprints not getting linked to symbols

Your list of “Footprint Libraries” is empty (Except for that “general” thing).

There should be a long list of libraries over there.
There should be some 100+ libraries, linking to 20.000 or so footprints:

This means that the default footprint libraries are not properly managed, and there are (at least) two common causes for this.
Sometimes they are not installed at all, the other common cause is that you clicked on “no” or on “cancel” when KiCad asked you to generate the library tables.

The first (not installed) is easy to check in the installed size of KiCad. A complete install is around 4GB, while without the libraries it’s probably less then 1GB.

The easiest way to fix the second cause is to exit KiCad, Then go to your configuration directory and then delete the “fp-lib-table” file. Then start KiCad again, and when you do something that is related to footprints, it should ask you if it should generate a new fp-lib-table file.

The link below has a lot of info concering library management in KiCad.