Subject: bug#56567: [BUG] Gnome doesn't recognize applications path for flatpak

From: Csepp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:57:35 +0200

Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> writes:

> Am Sonntag, dem 17.07.2022 um 06:03 +0000 schrieb Jacob Hrbek:
>> Why is making a user configuration saner in comparison to making it
>> work out of the box?
> Because in this instance "making it work out of the box" entails
> statefulness that most Guix users would typically like to avoid.  Plus,
> we are not talking about a very complicated setup here, it's one line
> of shell code to drop into your .bash_profile or similar:
>
> export
> $XDG_DATA_DIRS="$HOME/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS
> "
>
> Now granted, if you wanted to account for the fact that XDG_DATA_DIRS
> could be empty on some systems (some foreign distros rely on the
> implicit default), then you'd have to code around that, but that's
> again not within the scope of Guix System.

Since I am running into this same issue on Sway, *even though* I added
that line to my Zsh profile, I don't think the user config route is the
right one to recommend.
Editing environment variables certainly *seems* easy, but I consider
myself fairly adept at Linux and I could not tell you in what order they
are loaded, and clearly it matters, since j4-dmenu-desktop gets the
wrong variables when launched from Sway, but the right ones when
launched from a terminal.  Even though Sway was also run from a
terminal, via dbus-run-session.
So clearly there are a lot of moving parts, and a regular user who just
wants desktop apps to work should not be expected to manually edit these
files.