Snap application icons do not appear with Wayland

[Joseph Borg]

Using 18.04 (Bionic). After installing desktop applications via Snap, the icons do no appear in the applications menu. If I logout and switch to Xorg, they appear. If I then log out and return to Wayland, they are still there but are lost again on reboot.

[Lucy Llewellyn (lucyllewy)]

Could you run `snap version` and post the output here? Add any other information you think might be pertinent such as distro (ubuntu?) release number of distro, system architecture (x86, amd64...), kernel version....

[Lucy Llewellyn (lucyllewy)]

Sorry, I missed that you pointed out Ubuntu 18.04. Might also be worth mentioning which desktop environment you're using (Gnome?).

[Joseph Borg (joeborg)]

No worries,

Using Gnome default on 18.04. Kernel is 4.15.0-041500-generic on amd64.

snap 2.30
snapd 2.30
series 16
ubuntu 18.04
kernel 4.15.0-041500-generic

[AlexRieper (mateusz-sobas)]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 17.10 with gnome 3.26.2 on wayland

snap 2.31.2
snapd 2.31.2
series 16
ubuntu 17.10
kernel 4.13.0-37-generic

[Travis Raup (travis.raup)]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 16.04.4 with Xfce.

snap 2.32.3.2
snapd 2.32.3.2
ubuntu 16.04
kernel 4.13.0-1012-azure

Using xrdp to remote desktop into an Azure VM. Tried to install phpstorm with snap which did so successfully however the desktop launcher is missing from the application menu.

I can see when I ssh into my VM my path includes the desktop directory (/var/lib/snapd/desktop) but not in my xrdp session. The XDG_DATA_DIRS env variable is empty when I xrdp but with ssh it's populated.

[Giuseppe C (peppecal)]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 18.10 with Gnome 3.30.2

snap 2.37.2
snapd 2.37.2
series 16
ubuntu 18.10
kernel 4.18.0-16-generic

To add some more information: this problem does not affect every snap; for me Chromium is unaffected, while Atom, the editor, is.

[Kenneth Koski (knkski)]

I am using fish shell (on wayland), and installing the `bass` plugin and adding this to `~/.config/fish/config.fish` worked for me:

    bass source /etc/profile

[Joseph Borg (joeborg)]

I’m zsh, you can add

emulate sh -c 'source /etc/profile'

To your .zshenv to fix

[Dominik Steffen (0x6e766c)]

Hey,
i can report the same bug. For me only some snap apps are influenced by the bug while others still show the icons. My system is configured like this:

Ubuntu 18.04LTS
Linux clds 4.19.0-041900-generic
GNOME Shell 3.28.3

Just started a week ago. I think it was related to snap updates. Occured from one day to another.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

So this sounds like a problem that I fixed in the following PR:

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/6813

That in turn was based on some discussion in bug 1640514. The apps are missing because /var/lib/snapd/desktop is not in $XDG_DATA_DIRS. Previously, the code that did this relied on the user's shell sourcing /etc/profile, which didn't happen for zsh users. The PR also tries to do this via the /usr/lib/environment.d mechanism, which should be shell agnostic.

It looks like these changes were first released in 2.40, which only made its way to bionic updates on 2nd September (the /usr/lib/environment.d changes need to come from the .deb package rather than the snap).

If people are still seeing this problem with 2.40+, please comment.

[Marlin (lytefm)]

Hi,

I'm still having the problem when using zsh as shell and logging in with Ubuntu on Wayland. I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 from a clean 17.10. At first, the cog wheel to select Wayland didn't show up, so I ran

➜ sudo apt install gnome-session-wayland

after which I could start a Wayland session on the login screen. With bash, everything works as expected, with zsh neither are the desktop icons available nor can I access the snaps directly from the command line. I added this manually to my .zshrc:

source /etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh

And I get the expected results for echo $PATH and echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS, can start snaps from the command line but the Desktop icons are still missing. I'm using these:

➜ ~ zsh --version
zsh 5.4.2 (x86_64-ubuntu-linux-gnu)

➜ ~ snap --version
snap 2.42
snapd 2.42
series 16
ubuntu 18.04
kernel 4.15.0-66-generic

[Anks (helloanks0029)]

snap 2.43.2
snapd 2.43.2
series 16
ubuntu 18.04
kernel 5.3.0-40-generic
i m facing same problem all the sanps i download from software center can not be accesed directly fro my application or from home screen

[Mithun Madhusoodanan (mantlecurve)]

snap 2.44.3+20.04
snapd 2.44.3+20.04
series 16
ubuntu 20.04
kernel 5.4.0-24-generic