The latest update to xdg-desktop-portal causes caja plugins to throw thousands of errors filling the syslog

[Bill Miller]

After updates this month to my Ubuntu 20.04 system running MATE desktop with snapd removed.

I noticed CPU utilization was up 25% constantly and the syslog was filled with errors from caja plugins.

I did a timeshift restore to 11/30 and then did updates one by one. The culprit is xdg-desktop-portal. I removed it from my system and the problems stopped.

Apparently this package serves no purpose on a system that does not used snapd or flatpak anyway.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: xdg-desktop-portal 1.6.0-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-56.62~20.04.1-generic 5.15.64
Uname: Linux 5.15.0-56-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.25
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: MATE
Date: Sat Dec 3 17:43:35 2022
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-04-27 (1681 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
SourcePackage: xdg-desktop-portal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2021-10-03 (426 days ago)

[Dan Christensen (jdc)]

This is also happening on an up-to-date Ubuntu 22.04 system. I get new messages sent to syslog about every 2 seconds:
```
Dec 3 20:24:55 jdc systemd[1299545]: snap.snapd-desktop-integration.snapd-desktop-integration.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 3203.
Dec 3 20:24:55 jdc systemd[1299545]: Stopped Service for snap application snapd-desktop-integration.snapd-desktop-integration.
Dec 3 20:24:55 jdc systemd[1299545]: Started Service for snap application snapd-desktop-integration.snapd-desktop-integration.
Dec 3 20:24:56 jdc snapd-desktop-i[1722613]: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
```

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Bill Miller (wbmilleriii)]

I found out steam requires xdg-desktop-portal so I installed the old version 1.6.0-1 and pinned it. (the problem version is 1.6.0-1ubuntu2)

This made steam happy again and did not show the syslog spam or CPU overhead effects.

[Dan Christensen (jdc)]

I got here based on a link, but my errors don't have to do with caja, so they are likely not related.

[Dan Christensen (jdc)]

It would help if the bug reporter posted examples of the log messages.

[Bill Miller (wbmilleriii)]

Dan Christensen, the bug title says that the messages were from caja plugins.

[Dan Christensen (jdc)]

The exact messages will help debug the issue.

[Sam (i41bktobiu5q-launchpadnet)]

Bill Miller, this is promising research. We just tried reverting two systems based on your Ask Ubuntu answer, which is what I think Dan saw. We don't have an older version of xdg-desktop-portal-gtk to revert to on our 22.04 systems, but we reverted various combinations of xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and the syslog spam continued. We then re-applied both updates and on one system the messages stopped (at least as of now). On the other system they continued. Very strange. So there's some interaction with what's happening to Dan and me. Thanks for your work on this.