Small problem with Brave browser

1

If I open the menu and look for Brave, click, the browser starts.
If Brave puts it in the Ubuntu dock (ubuntu-dock) and I click on the icon, it won’t start.
Obviously it starts without problems even with: snap run brave.

2

I’ve just installed brave, and it seems to work fine from the dock.
Could you tell us a bit more about your system? (the output of snap version might be a good start)

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3

I have Ubuntu 19.10

$ snap info brave
name: brave
summary: Community-maintained unofficial Snap of Brave Browser
publisher: Brave Software (brave)
contact: https://community.brave.com/
license: unset
description: |
We recommend downloading Brave using the instructions at
https://brave-browser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing-brave.html
instead. This Snap is community maintained and may not be on the latest
Brave release.
commands:

  • brave
    snap-id: uE3hSmGE91m9MpbDEnUWi2vpeumH6gmv
    tracking: stable
    refresh-date: today at 10:35 CEST
    channels:
    stable: 0.69.135 2019-10-17 (60) 173MB -
    candidate: ↑
    beta: ↑
    edge: ↑
    installed: 0.69.135 (60) 173MB -

I created a short video: https://youtu.be/GjiJ33BGCDM

4

I add that I have many snap packages, about 40 (if I don’t consider frameworks etc …) The only app that doesn’t start when it’s added to the dock is Brave.
Tried adding it to the Kubuntu task manager and starting it.

5

as far as I can tell there’s something in the .desktop file (/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop) that the launcher doesn’t like: if I install, say, chromium, and copy its .desktop file over, and change all ‘chromium’ to ‘brave’, it works. If instead I leave the original desktop file and change its exec line to a script that just logs a timestamp, the script is never called.

I don’t know where the launcher logs things to see if it’s printing an error about this though.

1 Like
6

Got it!

The brave snap ships a broken .desktop file, in the following sense:

The [Action] entries refer to binaries that are not in the snap. This would normally only be a minor annoyance, because those binaries don’t exist, but because they are not in the snap the whole Exec line gets filtered out. Snapd warns about this in the logs, for developers to notice (shame on me for not checking there earlier), but as there’s nothing for a user to do it doesn’t alert the user about it:

Oct 17 14:09:22 ubuntu snapd[2510]: desktop.go:129: cannot use line "Exec=/usr/bin/brave-browser-stable" for desktop file "/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop" (snap brave)
Oct 17 14:09:22 ubuntu snapd[2510]: desktop.go:129: cannot use line "Exec=/usr/bin/brave-browser-stable --incognito" for desktop file "/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop" (snap brave)

The easiest workaround for now, until the snap gets fixed, is for you to remove the Actions line in the desktop file:

sudo sed -i -e '/^Actions=/d' /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/brave_brave.desktop

this change is ephemeral and will get overwritten next time brave gets refreshed, but hopefully that is what you want (because the next refresh should include the fix…).

But for that to be true somebody needs to let them know. Volunteers?

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7

@posix4e maybe one for you ^

8

I created a new release with https://github.com/brave/unofficial-snap/commit/ce05ec35e624ffa98e5c44719a7d29cd902fff75

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