Flatpak won't launch X11 apps anymore, but native apps work with XWayland

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Hi everyone!

I’m fairly new to Linux in general so bear with me, but I upgraded to Fedora 44 beta (KDE Plasma) recently because I needed the new NVIDIA drivers, and things got weird when I only updated the drivers and nothing else.

Now, I’m running into a new issue where Flatpak apps that could previously use X11 or Wayland windowing can only run on Wayland. If I disable Wayland in Flatpak settings, they will not launch at all.

I need some apps to use X11, due to bugs or lack of features.

On Fedora 43, this wasn’t a problem. I could easily go into Flatpak settings either using System Settings or Flatseal and disable Wayland. If I had X11 enabled, it would run fine. Ever since updating to Fedora 44 beta, these apps will not launch, or will crash at launch.

I’ve tried sudo flatpak repair and sudo dnf reinstall flatpak, with no luck. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated!

System info:

  • Fedora Linux 44 (KDE Prerelease) x86_64
  • Kernel: Linux 6.19.10-300.fc44.x86_64
  • DE: KDE Plasma 6.6.3
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K (16) @ 5.10 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 [Discrete]

With Wayland disabled, attempting to run the following in the terminal produces this output (omitting some lines):

  • Blender:
ghost.system | Failed to initialize display for back-end(s): ['WAYLAND', 'X11'].
ERROR Unable to initialize GHOST, exiting!

  • Spotify: (nothing, but won’t launch)

  • OBS:

Failed to create wl_display (No such file or directory).
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
qt.qpa.plugin: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
2

Fedora 44 bundles GNOME 50 while Fedora 43 uses GNOME 49…

GNOME 50 is the first release that’s all Wayland (X11 parts have been removed). Apps that still require X11 have to use the XWayland bridge.

Hopefully by the time F44 is officially released, popular apps shipped via Flatpak will have been updated, but until then, it might be hit or miss.

3

Shoutout to Reddit user chrisawi for the help! It seems like a Flatpak regression, but specifying the sockets on the command line, as suggested, works perfectly.

For example,

flatpak run --nosocket=wayland --nosocket=fallback-x11 --socket=x11 com.obsproject.Studio

Not sure how this could have happened, but this solves my issue. I can add these arguments to my .desktop files as well.

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