Deltachat flatpak not opening file manager to allow attaching images or files

Mutual Help
1

I’ve already resolved this problem, but am making a post here in case it’s helpful for others

Delta Chat version
1.44

Platform
Arch Linux, Sway window manager, thunar file manager, deltachat installed the recommended way from flathub

Expected behavior
when i click the paperclip icon to send an image or file to a friend, a file manager opens and allows me to select something to attach

Actual behavior
when i click the paperclip icon, nothing happens

Steps to reproduce the problem

  1. install from flathub with recommended command:
flatpak install flathub chat.delta.desktop
  1. add computer as second device
  2. try to send attachment to a friend

Solution

  1. uninstall delta chat with:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data chat.delta.desktop
  1. re-install with --user flag:
flatpak --user install flathub chat.delta.desktop
  1. file attachment works as expected

Comments
i unfortunately don’t know what the root cause was here, but this seemed to fix it. i’m documenting for posterity and because with this particular setup (arch/wayland/flatpak), anyone having this issue will encounter a lot of red herrings related to xdg portal configuration and wayland/electron compatibility and runtime logs about failed dbus socket connections and GTK cast errors. ultimately none of those were the cause of my issue, and simply reinstalling with --user made deltachat work.

i’m not a frequent flatpak user, and so the option to install with the --user flag wasn’t known to me. both the delta chat downloads page and the flathub page for delta chat instruct the user to install without the --user flag.

2

can’t reproduce the issue on xubuntu 22.04…

3

i think it’s likely that this is arch specific

4

Can you file an issue at Issues · deltachat/deltachat-desktop · GitHub and help the desktop developers resolve it? Probably more people are affected.

As a temporary fix for people who install it in the future, I changed https://get.delta.chat/ so it recommends installing it with --user.

5

i would have been happy to, but i wanted to do my due diligence first. so i uninstalled delta chat again and reinstalled without --user, and the issue isn’t present anymore. this time, a system install of delta chat does actually correctly open the file manager.

so my suggested solution above is incorrect – i’m sorry for that! i thought that i had isolated the solution well enough but clearly i did not.

looking through my shell and log history, the best theory i can come up with is that between noticing the issue and reinstalling with --user, i also configured my xdg-desktop-portal correctly, which on arch is a very manual process and on almost all other distros is something you never have to think about.

my xdg-desktop-portal logs viewed with journalctl --user -u xdg-desktop-portal look like this:

-- Boot c30f5d3cbe12424eaa4b3ca03522bef0 --
Mar 31 00:22:15 holt systemd[1230]: Starting Portal service...
Mar 31 00:22:16 holt xdg-desktop-por[2179]: No skeleton to export
Mar 31 00:22:16 holt systemd[1230]: Started Portal service.
Mar 31 11:49:08 holt systemd[1230]: Stopping Portal service...
Mar 31 11:49:08 holt systemd[1230]: Stopped Portal service.
-- Boot 89c136f278b449d7a09624f2f996a3d2 --
Mar 31 11:51:28 holt systemd[1304]: Starting Portal service...
Mar 31 11:51:28 holt xdg-desktop-por[3012]: No skeleton to export
Mar 31 11:51:28 holt systemd[1304]: Started Portal service.
Mar 31 13:26:58 holt systemd[1304]: Stopping Portal service...
Mar 31 13:26:58 holt systemd[1304]: Stopped Portal service.
-- Boot dba5332cc7974e7a956b5f7797201dcf --
Mar 31 16:23:31 holt systemd[1207]: Starting Portal service...
Mar 31 16:23:31 holt xdg-desktop-por[1436]: No skeleton to export
Mar 31 16:23:31 holt systemd[1207]: Started Portal service.
Mar 31 23:53:13 holt systemd[1207]: Stopping Portal service...
Mar 31 23:53:13 holt systemd[1207]: Stopped Portal service.
-- Boot 7808174c78c2431aaf6b0c57bb45f355 --
Mar 31 23:54:33 holt systemd[1445]: Starting Portal service...
Mar 31 23:54:33 holt systemd[1445]: Started Portal service.
Mar 31 23:56:24 holt systemd[1445]: Stopping Portal service...
Mar 31 23:56:24 holt systemd[1445]: Stopped Portal service.
-- Boot 045ba937606741d5af7444614c680c28 --
Mar 31 23:57:44 holt systemd[1431]: Starting Portal service...
Mar 31 23:57:45 holt systemd[1431]: Started Portal service.
Apr 01 00:27:41 holt systemd[1431]: Stopping Portal service...
Apr 01 00:27:41 holt systemd[1431]: Stopped Portal service.
-- Boot 70ff6b0fca984a698f7eac1d2de79e06 --

at some point yesterday evening while i was troubleshooting, xdg-portal-desktop stopped complaining that there was No skeleton to export. at this same time, my shell history shows that i was doing lots of xdg configuration.

so this was not about the flatpak install type at all, and instead was probably caused by incomplete Arch configuration. and if another arch user finds this thread, they should follow the xdg-portal configuration steps in the wiki

1 Like
6

the correct repo to file flatpak issue is GitHub - flathub/chat.delta.desktop

7

okay :slight_smile: then I’ll revert the statement on the website as well.

1 Like