I spent the morning trying to work out why all the Electron applications on my desktop (vscodium, the Signal client …) were once-a-fuc•ing-gain showing me clunky, foreign file-open and file-save dialogues (presumably from gtk) instead of correctly showing KDE’s dialogues via the very-cursed XDG-desktop-portal mechanism.

I’m on Gentoo. Had I, perhaps, broken something?

Nope. It’s just yet another regression up-stream, in Electron:

Once again, despite knowing that nobody has support for something because that thing has not been released as stable at all, yet, the whole Electron stack follows the belief that it’s perfectly OK to release a change that depends on that thing and, without it, breaks every KDE user’s desktop integration.

Then they blame it on xdg-desktop-portal not having released, yet. And won’t roll the change back because December is their “quiet month” – neither will they fix it nor make a work-around, seemingly.

Anyway. Writing this post has served to exhaust my ire. One day, we’ll see the back of Electron for good – I can only hope!

Let it also serve as a PSA: don’t bother trying to work out if you’ve accidentally broken something on your Linux desktop – particularly if you’re on Gentoo, Arch, Slackware or other hacker-friendly distribution. It’s not you. It’s not your system. It’s just fuc•ing Electron – again!

  • ꌗꉓꃅ꒒ꍟꀎ𝔻ꍟℜ𝕊𝕋𝕌ℝℤ@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    8·
    17 hours ago

    I don’t see it as a “lol” matter.

    The Electron project made an extremely stupid decision. Individual people who are left to wrangle with the fall-out and manage the PR have nothing but my utmost sympathy, as do all the down-stream projects (Signal, Discord, VSCodium…) who have to do the same. Even the developers of xdg-desktop-portal are facing unnecessary backlash because of this. Their release schedule and time-line for when org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser v. 4 could be reliably expected to exist in the wild was surely not kept in secret!