[snap] Documents opened with libreoffice snap do not appear in "recent files" list of nautilus

[Rüdiger Kupper]

I'm not sure if it's nautilus or Gnome shell keeping the list of recent files. I'm talking about this file:
 ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
It usually contains all recently used files. However, if you open some file with the libreoffice snap, it won't get added to this list. Consequently, it will not later appear in the "recently used" section of nautilus, nor will the Gnome shell "recent files" plugin list it.

It is, however, in Libreoffice's own recent files list (Files->Recently used documents)

[Rüdiger Kupper (ruediger.kupper)]

For me, this disrupts the daily workflow with LO to an extent where I consider changing back from the snap to deb.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

When opening the file from nautilus, it is correctly added to the list of recently used files.

When opening the file from within libreoffice (snap) however, the file is added to the sandboxed list: $HOME/snap/libreoffice/current/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.

Nautilus handles one single list of recently used files.

This is not specific to the libreoffice snap, other snaps using the GtkRecentManager API will suffer the same problem.

I am not sure whether we really want to do something about this though: exposing which files were open by a sandboxed application for the entire system (and every unsandboxed application out there) to see seems like an important information leak to me.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I opened a thread on the snapcraft forum to discuss this further: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/gtkrecentmanager-and-recently-used-files-in-sandboxed-applications/8702.

[Rüdiger Kupper (ruediger.kupper)]

Thanks Olivier, I see the potential leak. However, it makes LO somewhat less useful for me, because I very frequently access files form the recently used list. All in all, it seems that the question is, how snaps can be integrated into a desktop shell so as to give the user a flawless experience of the desktop as a whole. For years, desktop shells like GNOME or KDE strive to give an integrated "touch and feel" to the user. The (intended) separation of snaps from each other seem to contradict this design goal. In the end, the desktop might just feel like a loose assembly of separate applications running side by side without much interaction. I'm not sure how this can be resolved.