snapd renders thunderbird unusable

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

after upgrading my Lubuntu machine from 22.04 to 23.04, thunderbird became virtually unusable, because about every half of a second there's an AppArmor notification that a read operation on ~/.xsession-errors by thunderbird had been denied. Since every log entry causes a popup, that vanishes after a few seconds, my desktop is full with about twenty of those alerts permanently popping up and vanishing.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.04
Package: snapd 2.59.1+23.04ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.2.0-27.28-generic 6.2.15
Uname: Linux 6.2.0-27-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.26.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: LXQt
Date: Mon Sep 4 01:07:23 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-04-28 (1954 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
RebootRequiredPkgs: Error: path contained symlinks.
SourcePackage: snapd
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to lunar on 2023-06-26 (69 days ago)

[Chris Guiver (guiverc)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

Bug reporting is about finding & fixing problems thus preventing future users from hitting the same bug.

I suspect a Support site would be more appropriate, eg. https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu. You can also find help with your problem in the support forum of your local Ubuntu community http://loco.ubuntu.com/ or asking at https://askubuntu.com or https://ubuntuforums.org, or for more support options please look at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/community-support/709

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

I do consider this as a bug, since snapd, based on good effort, but shortsighted security design, blocks access to everything residing in the home directory starting with a dot (i.e. all "hidden" files and directories), while thunderbird seems to permanently read ~/.xsession-errors.

The security measures of snapd don't seem to allow thunderbird to run in every details, and this looks like a bug.