Linux causal here.

Long story short: I’ve been trying to fiddle with scaling on Kubuntu 24.04 after fixing a broken install, all the flatpak apps suddenly got stuck on x11 mode and refused to use anything else and wouldn’t scale at all, tried following some guides online and everything got screwed up, nothing will launch anymore.

I used sudo flatpak override --system followed by some other stuff, no idea if that was a major mistake or not but that’s what the search results recommended.

Tried reinstalling flatpak, tried reinstalling an app to see if that fixed anything (it didn’t), tried to reverse the overrides through other commands (didn’t do anything), took a peek at some folders to see if I could delete some configs or something and reset flatpaks settings (couldn’t find anything), and a bunch of other stuff, literally nothing works man, no idea what’s going on… System apps launch fine, deb apps too, so the system is fine I think, scaling on system apps works, but flatpak and it’s apps is completely screwed, won’t scale, and now just won’t launch whatsoever, help?

EDIT: tried the flatpak repair command, also tried to run an app through the command line to see what’s wrong exactly, it gave me a bunch of numbers with Missing X server or $DISPLAY and The platform failed to initialize. Exiting. at the end.

  • DollyDullerEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    man 1 flatpak-override

    Overrides the application specified runtime requirements. This can be used to grant a sandboxed application more or less resources than it requested.

    By default the application gets access to the resources it requested when it is started. But the user can override it on a particular instance by specifying extra arguments to flatpak run, or every time by using flatpak override.

    The application overrides are saved in text files residing in $XDG_DATA_HOME/flatpak/overrides in user mode.

    Scroll down, you will see the --reset option to remove the overrides.

    I noticed you used sudo to run the command, so I think the override files are stored in /var/lib/flatpak/overrides/. To get everything back to normal, try deleting everything inside that directory.

    If you want to override the system-wide settings, you can create files in the same format as the ones in /var/lib/flatpak/overrides/, but put them in /home/your_username/.local/share/flatpak/overrides/.

    To generate the pre-config settings for a flatpak, you can use the flatpak -m info app_id command. This will show you some info about the flatpak, and the -m option will print out the metadata. You can also save this info to a file by running flatpak -m info app_id > ~/.local/share/flatpak/overrides/app_id.

    When you edit the file, pay attention to the Context, System Bus Policy, and Session Bus Policy sections and delete everything else. By default, flatpak is set to share some resources, but you can deny access by adding an exclamation mark before the resource, for example, you could change shared=network to shared=!network.

    If you’re looking for a user-friendly way to manage flatpak permissions, I recommend checking out flatseal. It’s a great GUI tool that can make it easier for you in this case.

    That being said, it’s always a good idea to be cautious when using commands posted online. Make sure you understand what you’re doing before copying and pasting anything into your terminal. And if you’re ever unsure about something, there are some great resources available to help you out.

    One of the best places to start is the Arch wiki, and I think, man is a friend everybody needs!

    • rerwidn@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      That’s definitely handy, gonna bookmark that stuff somewhere for later on, thx! Though I’m not the best with technical stuff or big ol’ manuals, and right now I sorta don’t have the time or energy to sift through all of it, just wanna fix this issue real quick if possible so I can continue with my day.

      I did check the var lib override folder, nothings there strangely, no hidden files or anything even, completely blank. Scrolled down with the man 1 command in the terminal, also nothings there, what am I looking out for here? Are the overrides gone? Is this a different issues now or? Said something about X server missing when running an app through the terminal, what do I do about that?

      I do have flatseal and do use it, but it’s a flatpak so I can’t launch it right now.

      • DollyDullerEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        It’s likely because it can’t access X11 or Wayland. To fix this, try editing the files in /home/your_username/.local/share/flatpak/overrides/ like I mentioned earlier. Specifically, look for the sockets line and make sure it includes wayland, x11, and x11-fallback like sockets=wayland;x11;x11-fallback;. This should help you launch flatpaks that need X11 access.

        • rerwidn@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          Alright I took a look, and all I see are text files of only a few of the apps, nothing else is present as far as I’m seeing right now, and in them there’s only a single command of text, all of them are different. Is that normal?