I spent the morning trying to work out why all the Electron applications on my desktop (vscodium, the Signal client …) were once-a-fuc•ing-gain showing me clunky, foreign file-open and file-save dialogues (presumably from gtk) instead of correctly showing KDE's dialogues via the very-cursed XDG-desktop-portal mechanism.
I'm on Gentoo. Had I, perhaps, broken something?
Nope. It's just yet another regression up-stream, in Electron:
- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/231173#issuecomment-2410885232
- https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/43819#issuecomment-2379445244
- https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/1445#issuecomment-2379375660
- https://github.com/flathub/org.signal.Signal/issues/719
Once again, despite knowing that nobody has support for something because that thing has not been released as stable at all, yet, the whole Electron stack follows the belief that it's perfectly OK to release a change that depends on that thing and, without it, breaks every KDE user's desktop integration.
Then they blame it on xdg-desktop-portal not having released, yet. And won't roll the change back because December is their "quiet month" – neither will they fix it nor make a work-around, seemingly.
Anyway. Writing this post has served to exhaust my ire. One day, we'll see the back of Electron for good – I can only hope!
Let it also serve as a PSA: don't bother trying to work out if you've accidentally broken something on your Linux desktop – particularly if you're on Gentoo, Arch, Slackware or other hacker-friendly distribution. It's not you. It's not your system. It's just fuc•ing Electron – again!
Why did your distro update those Electron apps, if they have unsatisfied dependencies?
The apps are Flatpak'ed, so they update independently of the system.
But yeah why did Flatpak update them when Flatpak has unsatisfied dependencies? (To be fair the apps still work, it's mostly a ergonomic and cosmetic regression)
This doesn't only affect Flatpak apps. The
xdg-desktop-portalmechanism is used by many things. Even "gtk native" applications like Firefox use it when running on a correctly configured KDE environment and one of the nuances of this issue is that those applications – today – continue to work perfectly. Electron is not part of their stack.I have
flatpakon my desktop just for Steam and even flatpak'd steam still seems to work, correctly.