No menu entries after installing snaps on Debian 10 Cinnamon

Hi,

This topic is quite often and I have been searching around without being able to fix the issue.

I have Debian 10 with Cinnamon GUI environment. In /etc/profile.d I have a file apps-bin-path.sh with:

# shellcheck shell=sh

# Expand $PATH to include the directory where snappy applications go.
snap_bin_path="/snap/bin"
if [ -n "${PATH##*${snap_bin_path}}" ] && [ -n "${PATH##*${snap_bin_path}:*}" ]; then
    export PATH=$PATH:${snap_bin_path}
fi

# Ensure base distro defaults xdg path are set if nothing filed up some
# defaults yet.
if [ -z "$XDG_DATA_DIRS" ]; then
    export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share:/usr/share"
fi

# Desktop files (used by desktop environments within both X11 and Wayland) are
# looked for in XDG_DATA_DIRS; make sure it includes the relevant directory for
# snappy applications' desktop files.
snap_xdg_path="/var/lib/snapd/desktop"
if [ -n "${XDG_DATA_DIRS##*${snap_xdg_path}}" ] && [ -n "${XDG_DATA_DIRS##*${snap_xdg_path}:*}" ]; then
    export XDG_DATA_DIRS="${XDG_DATA_DIRS}:${snap_xdg_path}"
fi

I have logged out and logged in again without any success. Furthermore echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS gives:

/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/

It seems it doesn’t include the one for snap. I have tried also to put in ~/.profile the $XDG_DATA_DIRS, ie.

XDG_DATA_DIRS="$XDG_DATA_DIRS:/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications"

but again with no success.

snap --version
snap 2.49.2
snapd 2.49.2
series 16
debian 10
kernel 4.19.0-16-amd64

Thanks

A quite temporary solution I tried was to link desktop files of snap with then one in local folder, i.e.

cd ~/.local/share/applications/
ln -s /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/my_app.desktop my_app.desktop

this mells a bit like cinnamon does not fully respect the XDG spec … unless your login manager does not export it as expected …

I just had the same problem, running Debian testing on Cinnamon,
I figured half of the issue, check link below

https://discourse.destinationlinux.network/t/about-running-snaps-on-debian-testing

But, I am not able to set Brave browser as default in the system settings,
when I try to run Brave snap from CL, this is what I get,

WARNING: cgroup v2 is not fully supported yet, proceeding with partial confinement
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “xapp-gtk3-module”

Hope this helps the OP, if still has this issue.

Laters

I figured something, lightdm does not implement snappies shortcuts in the menu for some reason, so switching to either gmd or sddm or lxdm fixes the issue,

That’s it.