The chromium-browser snap package fails to run

[C. Jeffery Small]

Xubuntu 19.10
chromium-browser 79.0.3945.79-0ubuntu0.19.10.2
Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap

Chromium worked fine before the upgrade to 19.10. There has been a transition to snap packaging.

My first attempt to launch the browser results in:

% chromium-browser
2020/01/30 11:12:47.911841 cmd_run.go:529: WARNING: XAUTHORITY environment value is not a clean path: "/x/u/jeff/.Xauthority"
cannot perform operation: mount --rbind /home /tmp/snap.rootfs_MDsNgD//home: Permission denied

% dmesg | grep DENIED (just showing one typical message)
[827635.380132] audit: type=1400 audit(1580411567.940:87): apparmor="DENIED" operation="mount" info="failed flags match" error=-13 profile="/snap/core/8268/usr/lib/snapd/snap-confine" name="/tmp/snap.rootfs_MDsNgD/home/" pid=2968 comm="snap-confine" srcname="/x/u/" flags="rw, rbind"

The home directory is: /u/jeff

The home directory is actually resides on an external drive mounted on /x with /u being a symlink to /x/u

% cd /
% ls -l home u
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 Jan 2 2015 home -> u
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 30 2017 u -> x/u

%echo $XAUTHORITY
/u/jeff/.Xauthority

Applications should not care about these sorts of mounts and linkages, but they now appear to be very sensitive to them. What needs to be done to make this work?

BTW, I think this move to SNAP is a disaster and completely the wrong way to go. Let's please stick with a single .deb packaging strategy which has proven itself.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.