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!
It is understandable people are frustrated, I am frustrated, and joined several conversation regarding this problem. However, I don't appreciate some of the rant from many users. This change is certainly out-of-touch, potentially due to them don't quite foresee the amount of flatpak/kde users who are affected by this change.
But many complaints have been dangerously close to the line, if not over the line. Their quiet month policy is reasonable IMO, developers need breaks, especially those interacts frequently with the community. Love or hate electron (same apply to CEF), these works clearly bring many wonderful apps into the linux world.
I personally don't believe that non-contributors have the right to demand free work from the electron developers.
It seems like a lot of people who do that don't understand that there's an inverse relationship between devs soaking up all the emotional labor that comes with being the target of end users' ire and having the energy to get the actual work done. Especially when it comes to open source stuff, they could literally be spending the time they're spending shouting at a dev to do more dev things like.. learning to fix it themselves and submitting a commit.