Applications from installed snaps don't appear in activities overview

[Olivier Tilloy]

Under Unity, by specifying desktop files for apps in snapcraft.yaml, the apps would show up in the dash when installed, and could be launched from there. This doesn't appear to work in gnome-shell. Try e.g. the libreoffice snap.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I guess unity was made to look for desktop files in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ (which is where snapd installs them), and gnome-shell would need to be patched to do the same.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

And hopefully that would make the ubuntu dash-to-dock extension display the right icon for the running app.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

It looks like appending /var/lib/snapd/desktop to XDG_DATA_DIRS would make g_app_info_get_all() consider desktop files under /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Ah, in fact this works in an X session, but not under Wayland. This is because the file that adds that path to XDG_DATA_DIRS is /etc/X11/Xsession.d/65snappy.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

https://lwn.net/Articles/709769/ seems to indicate there's no Wayland equivalent to /etc/X11/Xsession.d/

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

This is clearly not a gnome-shell bug, tentatively re-targetting to snapd, although it might have to be addressed somewhere else.

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

This is already fixed in snapd master and should be out with the 2.28 release.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Fix: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/commit/2f55619677810a4872145b8ccbbe2bdc1ba364fa

[obrow (obrow)]

I don't know if it is supposed to be fixed in snapd version 2.29.4.2+17.10 but I have no access on snap applications through gnome-shell.
The only way to start an application is via the terminal doing a snap run command.

Notice that I upgraded from 17.04 and that it doesn't work with the x session neither.

It works ok when I run the unity desktop.