Fedora 42 - Flatpaks Fail to Launch (sometimes)

I recently updated my system to Fedora 42. The upgrade broke several things, but I have been able to fix most of them. One issue I have not been able to resolve is to do with flatpaks. I have a few apps installed via flatpak, and they have worked very well for quite some time. Unfortunately, some of them are no longer able to launch normally, returning the error “bwrap: execvp application: No such file or directory” when launching through the desktop icons or using “flatpak run org.publisher.application”. Investigating further, I pulled the commands from the line EXEC= in each .desktop file to rule them out as the problem, each of the form “/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=application --file-forwarding org.publisher.application”, but they did not work in the terminal either. However, if I first cd into the directory (/usr/bin) and then use "flatpak run --branch=stable . . . " in the terminal, the flatpak launches just fine.

I have tried updating and repairing (latest version [although it has not been updated in weeks, so it could not be the app’s fault anyway], nothing broken on the app end), fully reinstalled each of the applications, both retaining and clearing their data, ran flatpak override --reset --user, and tested on other platforms (Fedora 41, Debian, SteamOS) on which they function properly, so I assume the issue is something related to Fedora 42 specifically. Unfortunately, one of these applications is only available (for Linux) on flathub, so I need to find a solution because I like the ease of just clicking an icon. What might prevent bubblewrap from identifying the binary file from / but not from /usr/bin? Is there any way I can rebuild the desktop icon from scratch? Since the flatpak itself works, surely this problem is limited to something else. I do not know much about flatpaks, so I hope someone else might be able to answer that. Perhaps the issue could be tracked down from there. Many thanks for reading.

Is your path environment still intact? You could check with env in a terminal. Can you run other programs in /usr/bin/ without issues?

.desktop launchers for flatpak are in /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/. Could you try launching one using gtk-launch? e.g. is a desktop file is called org.gimp.GIMP.desktop, you would launch it as gtk-launch org.gimp.GIMP.desktop. Messages in the terminal might hint to what is wrong.

Thanks for the replies. It is, yes. Other programs ran fine from /usr/bin, only a couple problematic flatpaks had issues.

From the path Vanadium mentioned, when using gtk-launch, the affected flatpaks resulted in the error gtk-launch: No such application org.publisher.application.desktop.

I did some more tinkering and it inexplicably improved. I figured I would brute force a solution for each file manually by changing Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=application --file-forwarding org.publisher.application in the affected files to something else, but annoyingly, the issue vanished in the middle of this process. The other broken flatpaks began to work again, and reverting to the original format for the desktop file I tested did not reproduce the issue. I am glad to have solved it, but I wish I knew what was causing it in the first place.

Also, sorry for my poor formatting in my original post. Thanks again.

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