Is Kate as a flatpak supposed to be this broken ?

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1

Hi !

I have Kate installed as a flatpak on Fedora Kinoite, I thought I remember it worked well, but I keep running into issues.
Latest of which makes me create on account on here and a post:
I can’t seem to even use the software most basic feature, like a diff between two files:
”Diff Warning] Portal call failed: Failed to start command: Failed to change to directory “/app/bin” (No such file or directory)”
Is there maybe something wrong with the flatpak permissions ? Or is it expected behaviour ?

Thank you for your help

2

/app is a sandbox-internal directory, so that doesn’t look like a permissions issue at first sight.

Which remote is Kate installed from? Fedora or Flathub? flatpak list | grep kate will show you if you’re not sure.

3

Yes, it’s from Flathub

4

Can you share a screenshot of where you invoke the diff action? And also, where does this warning appear? Thx.

5

Hi ! I use right click on tab, compare with active document

Screenshot_20260421_113004
Screenshot_20260421_113004496×608 49.4 KB

The warning appears in the bottom bar thing. At the output section.

6

Does this error occur if you start Kate from the terminal:

$ cd /switch/to/directory
$ flatpak run org.kde.kate

7

Hum, to which directory are we talking about ? The one with the files in it ? The directory where diff is on my system ? I tried both. None of them work.

I know flatpak can be sometimes finicky with permissions. Maybe something happened Kate no-longer has the permissions it needs to work normally ?

8

It does for me in KDE Linux (so it’s not Fedora-specific).

I get an empty Diff window, and the following in the Output pane:

[13:05:28  PATH Info] /app/bin:/usr/bin
[13:05:28  TMPDIR Info] TMPDIR=/run/user/1000/app/org.kde.kate
[13:05:43  Diff Warning] Portal call failed: Failed to start command: Failed to change to directory ?/app/bin? (No such file or directory)

Screenshot:

image
image876×447 54.8 KB

9

Does anyone have any more ideas ?
I tried asking Gemini, it told me it needed “systembus access” in the flatpak permissions. That did not solve the diff not working.

10

I will look into this soon.

Just a note: Our builtin diff functionality requires that you have git installed on your system. We use git to compute the diff. So make sure you have that.

11

If we’re talking about Flatpak Kate, then git would need to be available inside the Flatpak.

Flatpaks are responsible for providing their own dependencies, so this isn’t something a user can fix - it’s a bug in the way the Flatpak has been packaged.

12

If we’re talking about Flatpak Kate, then git would need to be available inside the Flatpak.

We depend on a lot of stuff that is outside the flatpak e.g., the lsp servers, formatting tools. We can’t just bundle everything.

13

I checked, and on KDE Linux, git is already available from outside the Flatpak.

So the problem here can’t just be the lack of git.

14

Yes, Fedora Kinoite also has git layered by default.

I know the likely solution is “layer it”, but I would have liked to stick with the flatpak version.

15

And if anything, it’s easier to layer on Kinoite than it is on KDE Linux.

So I’d really like to understand what the recommended way of using Kate is on KDE Linux - is the Flatpak really not intended to be fully functional for KDE Linux users?

16

Raised a bug ticket:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519685

17

This is now fixed

18

Ah ! That’s awesome ! I’ll be waiting for it to release !