Flatpak Web Browser Native Messaging

I’m curious about the state of native messaging in flatpak web browsers and the prospect of supporting this in ublue. It seems like this functionality is getting close based on this pr - https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/705. How does that translate into ublue supporting it?

I’ve been limping along copy/pasting between my Keepass database and I’d really like to be able to use the browser extension again. I’m aware of the workarounds but I’d rather use an officially supported method.

The PR is still in progress for quite a while – I’m not even sure if we’re going to get it in 2024 if I’m being honest.

Now, what happens if and when the PR is merged is that xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and others will implement it on their specific packages. Once that is done, Fedora will pull it from upstream, and Universal Blue will automatically use that package.

In other words, no, there is no “ublue supporting it”. It’s just “we keep waiting till it’s merged, and we’ll get it in an update, just like any other Fedora updates.”

It’s been annoying me as well, for years in fact and still remains my biggest annoyance with Flatpak as a whole. Honestly, if it bothers you then you should just use distrobox, install the browser there, and install the corresponding xdg-desktop-portal package for your host Desktop Environment.

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Thanks for the detailed reply! I’ll have a look at the distrobox path in the meantime.

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Another alternative is Conty. I actually used Conty for the longest time, I only stopped because I haven’t been using Linux on desktop for the last half year or so due to my job and planning to sell my personal laptop (so Windows installed on both devices). From my experience, KDE Connect worked just fine through Conty as well, but idk about Keepass or download managers.