niels / Software / #linux,#snap,#wayland,#zsh

Snap apps with Wayland and Zsh

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There’s are two longstanding issues using snap apps in Ubuntu. Two issues that still exist in Ubuntu 20.04 beta.

Snap apps don’t show up in Gnome’s Activities view when using Wayland instead of Xorg.
Snap apps cannot be started from the command-line when using zsh instead of bash.
Looking into this, I ran into numerous discussions on both topics. Most notably:

ZSH

The zsh work-around mentioned in these and other discussions works very well. Just add the following line to your .zshrc. (Adding it to /etc/zsh/zshrc should work as well.)

emulate sh -c 'source /etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh'

When using bash the scripts in /etc/profile.d/ are sourced automatically. Zsh does not bother with them, unless we instruct it to.

Wayland

Unfortunately the work-arounds for Wayland did not work for me. They failed to convince Wayland and Gnome to look in snap’s applications folder.

The following line links snap’s applications folder into the Ubuntu’s main applications folder.

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ /usr/share/applications/snap

Unlike all the other work-arounds out there, there’s no need to logout and log back in. This works instantly.

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