Comment 3 for bug 1958667

I think you could get access to the real path but it's not trivial, you'd need to make raw DBus calls similar to the screenshotting scenario.

Although I can't test it and confirm, I think that on systems with the portals package greater than or equal to 1.8, you'd actually get the real value for paths where the non portal version already has access. Explicitly, this is most of $HOME and optionally /media and /mnt, if the users give that permission separately. The reason for this is that the portals already attempt to prevent unnecessary mirroring in /run, but in the 1.6 release, this is only working for Flatpak and not Snap. So all snap portal filepicker use in 20.04 ends up using /run even if it doesn't strictly need to.

So I imagine in Ubuntu 21.04+, Debian 11, etc; the prevalence of seeing the /run folder would be massively reduced. Especially for Grofaty who seems to have no issues with the non portal version, where presumably most your data is in $HOME anyway.