I have just built my first snap (https://snapcraft.io/sabaki). It’s an electron app (but I don’t think it matters much here).
After launching it a first time, it works great until I close it and want to reopen it. Here nothing happens, and it took me a long time to realize the issue were related to the content of the user-dirs.dirs file and the XDG directories variables in it. In my case, I have XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/home/hadim/Documents" and it turns out my ~/Documents is a symlink.
This issue has already been raised at Some snaps will only launch the first time and a simple fix is to simply remove the problematic line in user-dirs.dirs but I don’t think this is a very user-friendly solution and neither very accessible for regular users.
So, I am wondering whether there are alternative ways to address that issue? If XDG folders properties need to be enforced in some way, to make snap work properly, maybe it would be helpful to warn the users about it (sorry, but I literally lost 1h to figure out that snap didn’t work because I was using a symlink for my doc folder…).