Cannot run X applications on openSUSE Tumbleweed when using KDE

A user reported that when using openSUSE Tumbleweed (which is a nice rolling-release distribution if you’re not familiar with it) then under KDE desktop X applications cannot start.

The user reported the bug under the openSUSE bugzilla here: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1031501

Since the same applications work under GNOME I suspect there is some difference in how authentication happens between KDE and GNOME. Another theory might be that KDE is using wayland and the X compatibility code doesn’t kick in (no idea how that works).

@morphis Are you on top of this?

@niemeyer Yes, I am. I can reproduce this in KDE on 42.2/Tumbleweed but only in KDE. Running Gnome Shell on the same distribution doesn’t show the same problem. Wondering if there is something different in the gtk/qt libs we ship in Ubuntu KDE can’t deal with.

However this happily makes it not a snapd problem.

@morphis as long as we can make it work on any KDE we should be good. Does it also fail on Kubuntu?

Whether the problem is in snapd code or elsewhere, we want it working. Can you push things forward in that direction, perhaps asking for some help of the desktop team at Canonical?

@niemeyer That is my plan, yes :slight_smile:

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Thanks to a tip from Pat I’ve found the reason for this. On KDE the environment variable XAUTHORITY is not set which causes any application depending on X11 not to start. See https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1031501#c3 for more details.

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