Blink-based browsers don't open file dialog in sway (fedora 38)

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I have two machines that have recently been re-installed from scratch to run fedora 38. On my WFH machine, I installed workstation, tried a couple of different X11 DE’s and Wayland compositors, and settled on sway. On my personal machine I installed later, and used Sericea.

On my WFH machine, blink-based browsers (Brave, chromium, ungoogled-chromium) can’t open file dialogs in sway. Ctrl±o does nothing. Right clicking on an image or link, and selecting “Save link|image as” does nothing. File dialogs open fine on my Sericea sway desktop, and blink-based browsers work fine on my WFH machine under GNOME (X11 or Wayland) and Budgie. Just not with sway.

I’ve searched around, and maybe this is related to xdg-desktop-portal-(gnome|gtk|wlr). But I don’t really know what those are or what would be a good next step to troubleshoot.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the first thing I tried was:

mv ~/.config/sway ~/.config/sway.tmp

exited sway, and logged back in to a default config. File dialogs still didn’t work, so I’m reasonably sure this isn’t a problem with my personal sway configuration.

ETA2: My memory sucks. My WFH machine was installed with Fedora 36 in Aug 2022. It’s been upgraded to 37, then 38. My personal machine was installed from scratch with Sericea 38.

2

Same problem here, I’ve been using ungoogled Chromium for a year now without problems with the command line: --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --ozone-platform=wayland

Since few weeks, I’m not sure when it started, the open file dialog doesn’t work anymore, just to mention few examples: doing right click + “Save As” on a link does nothing andI cannot export my bookmarks.
Firefox works correctly.
I’m on Fedora 38 running Sway 1.8.1-1.fc38 and I tried the following browsers:

  • com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium 116.0.5845.140 from flatpak
  • google-chrome-stable-117.0.5938.88-1.x86_64
  • com.microsoft.Edge 117.0.2045.35-1 from flatpak
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Good to know I’m not the only one. I wish I knew when it started, also, but I only use brave or ungoogled chromium for Microsoft Office/Teams (shudder), so I think I just blamed it on Teams for a long time.

brave-browser-1.58.129-1.x86_64 (rpm)
com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium 117.0.5938.88 stable flathub user

4

I had the same issue, I fixed it by adding sway to UseIn in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/gtk.portal

without this config there is no dbus interface org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser

not sure what should be the default interface for sway or how it was working previously

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@bengentil this fixed the problem for me, thank you very much for the advice!

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if you want to add any details or follow its resolution, if filed this bug report: 2241173 – File chooser dialog is not showing with sway

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That worked for me, also. Thank you, @bengentil ! I would have gotten there eventually, but you saved me a lot of time. I’m no DBUS or xdg-desktop-portal expert.

For anyone as inexperienced as me, here are the details of the change I made

In /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/gtk.portal I had this line originally:

UseIn=gnome

I sudo vied that file and changed the UseIn line to:

UseIn=gnome;sway

Then I logged out of sway, and logged back in, and Ctrl+o popped up a file dialog in chromium.

1 Like
8

This now got resolved in this topic: