Auto-type seems to be broken in Wayland for KeePassXC. Is there any workaround or alternative password manager that supports auto-type on Wayland.
I just recently moved to Fedora 43 Workstation from Arch Linux, and Wayland for me represented the most significant regression for the Linux desktop. Almost everything is broken, including basic screen sharing / screen recording and now even auto-type.
Certainly there must be solutions, I cannot believe Fedora/Gnome would be willing to break so many things without alternatives.
The only “workaround” I know of is an X11-based spin, like MATE.
Thankfully MATE is still around and I’m not changing from it anytime soon for my main system. My other machine on Gnome ran into this infuriating Wayland change and the usability is seriously worse, from unavailable Auto-type to copy/paste not working as before, etc.
It is sad that something not ready for production was pushed onto people like this. This is the first time in 8 years that I installed a Linux distro and I’ve had to do so much troubleshooting, but differently than 8 years ago, now there are simply no solution to get stuff to work.
I’m (now, currently) on Bazzite (which is Fedora-based). Autotype was working almost acceptably with QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb added to KeePassXC’s environment variables in Flatseal (it was awkward, but workable). Very recently, something changed in Fedora that broke Autotype almost completely: it now randomly substitutes lower-case symbols for random upper-case symbols. No one seems to want to fix it. Just like the OP, I don’t understand how Wayland breaking basic things like password managers doesn’t even seem to be talked about. It makes me think I’m “holding it wrong.” But, I can’t find a way to hold it right.
Reads to me like the issue is not Wayland per se, but QT5. From your own link:
All the quirks/glitches when trying using auto type on Wayland by using xcb are not / won't be addressed in the current Qt5 powered KeepassXC. The reason for having auto type disabled is because Qt5 support is poor. xcb is a workaround that should not be used. The migration to Qt6 is on progress, so soon the auto type will be enabled again
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651/
Yes. I agree that the upper-case/lower-case thing might be Qt5 related. I even tried looking at the Autotype code for KeePassXC (and that’s laughable as I have nowhere near the technical ability to do that). It does look Qt related. But, tracking that Qt5 to Qt6 transition there back, it looks like that’s been in the works for at least 4 years now. I assume that conversion is really difficult.
But, beyond this current issue, the first problem was with Wayland’s security model not allowing inter-app communication (I think – again, I’m just a normal person). I keep looking for a way around this so my password manager will actually work, but keep running into dead ends. I see a lot or recommendation to use an X11-based distribution. But, they all seem to be transitioning to Wayland (if not fully Wayland, already). I see recommendations to use a different password manager. But, it looks like they all have the Wayland inter-app communication problem. I keep looking for alternative ways of using my password manager (back to “holding it wrong”). But, AFAIK, it’s Autotype or browser integration. And, browser integration, apparently, doesn’t work with flatpaks (sandbox issue). I’d have to move off Bazzite to go the non-flatpak route (and I don’t want to do that since this is (was) the first distribution that seemed capable of getting me off Windows), but a lot of distributions are pushing flatpaks as the de facto packaging format.
I see plenty of articles talking about “The Top [n] Problems with Wayland.” But, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one mention Autotype in password managers not working. I was very surprised with my current Windows-to-Linux attempt when I ran into that problem. Surely linux people use password managers. So, I must be missing something. But, what it is, I don’t know.
How do people here manage their passwords? How do they enter them into web sites?
I use Keypass on Wayland myself - Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V work OK for my requirements - I don’t need to autotype anything, although it would be handy - one key-chord rather than two. However, Copy and Paste work without any issues.
Within a browser, I use Bitwarden to generate and maintain passwords - It pre-fills the username and password on sites I’ve configured it for.
It can be made to work by copying a couple of files into the browser Flatpak’s data directory (under ~/.var/app). Not an especially friendly way to set it up, but since you asked…
…that’s what I do.
If I need to enter a password in some non-browser place, I just manually copy and paste.
I found a script that sets up the Brave browser (flatpak) (which is what I use) integration with KeePassXC (flatpak) (ditto). It’s for Kinoite (another Fedora-based distribution that’s also atomic (like Bazzite (which is what I use)). It looks really well-done to me. I’ll have to try parsing it and comparing it to what @pg-tips referenced.
EDIT: Allowing for the different browsers and distributions, the script I found seems reasonable (but, I’m sure not an expert).
Update: as of Fedora 44 (which ships Flatpak 1.17), the scripts that people linked to above…
…need a small change.
When calling flatpak-spawn you now need to explicitly set PATH back to the value it normally has within the sandbox - otherwise it gets set to the user’s normal non-sandbox path.
In the solution I linked to, the flatpak-spawn call should be changed to: