Ever since i installed btrfs-assistant, flatpak applications can take minutes to start. Without it, they boot almost instantly. When i run onlyoffice for example from the terminal, i get the following output:
Any idea what might be causing this ?
Yes, there was an incompatibility with xdg-document-portal on Fedora that was fixed in Btrfs Assistant 2.1. What version are you running?
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Thank you for the quick reply. i am still running 2.0. i will upgrade and see if the problem persists.
I just installed 2.1.1 but the problem still persist.
Did you reboot or otherwise reset the issue before testing the new version?
Yes i rebooted before hand. Turns out, Selinux was also part of the issue because setting it to permissive fixed it. Thank you for helping.
Hey i confirm the issue is still occuring. I have installed the version btrfs-assistant-2.1.1-1.fc40. Basically, if i use the system without ever opening btrfs-assistant, no problem. However when i open it slows down flatpak apps opening. I have to reboot the system for it to work again.
To make sure that my settings aren’t affecting it, i installed fedora cinnamon in a vm with nothing else installed but onlyoffice flatpak and btrfs-assistant. The same thing happens.
Hmm…I can duplicate this now. I don’t know how to fix it though.
Here is the breakdown of the situation:
- Wayland doesn’t make it easy to run Qt applications as root
- To get an application to run as root under Wayland, I pass through the user’s
WAYLAND_DISPLAYandXDG_RUNTIME_DIR. If this isn’t done, the application will run under xwayland. - On Fedora only, this causes a second set of all
xdg-*processes to run includingxdg-document-portalwhich in turn causes/run/user/<UID>/docto have improper ownership. - That causes flatpak applications to hit a timeout before launching.
Ideally, the application would not as root but given how much root access is needed to work with snapper and btrfs, the only way to avoid this would be to have a separate process running as root and then setup some type of IPC between the GUI and the daemon. However, that is a major application rewrite which nobody has had the time to do yet.
What I don’t understand is why this only happens on Fedora. It doesn’t happen on other distros I have tested.
There are some workarounds you can use:
- You can kill the instance of
xdg-document-portalrunning as root. - You can launch Btrfs Assistant with
sudo -E btrfs-assistant-bin
Alternatively, if anyone knows a fix for this issue when running a Qt application as root under Wayland, please let me know.
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I can also reproduce the issue. This has not been the case in the past. The last time I ran into similar slow launch issues it was a regression in the xdg packages.
Hey, @dalto and thanks for your work on btrfs-assistant!
I suppose you haven’t made any progress on this issue, right? I saw Causing Permission Errors in Apps installed via Flatpak (bwrap) - Fedora 40 (#105) · Issues · Btrfs Assistant / Btrfs Assistant · GitLab
Is there someone you could bug so that you get some help with the issue?
btrfs-assistant is awesome and it’s a pitty this issue happens, so if we could get it sorted that would help the community. 
I am not really sure who could ask for help with this. To be honest, I am not even sure it is an issue with Btrfs Assistant.
It only happens on recent Fedora versions. I can duplicate it but I can’t find anyway to work around it except to run it on xwayland.
Ouch. This is your reminder to never, ever even think about running apps as root unless you’re prepared to deal with permissions errors when running as non-root…