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Yesterday, after Ubuntu (or maybe Dell) installed some updates and I restarted, my snap applications were not showing on my sidebar, nor are they present in "show applications" or a normal search.

They are still installed and snap list still shows them, and they will still run via snap run <application>.

I've tried uninstalling them all (although I did not use --purge when I ran snap remove <application>), followed by uninstalling snap itself, then re-installing everything. They are still present but not showing up.

More searching has brought me to sites referencing the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable (explained HERE). If I understand correctly this should link all the folders where applications are stored, and the paths within should be separated by colons, not spaces. Thus I ran echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS and was rewarded with:

/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/var/lib/snapd/desktop /var/lib/snapd/desktop /var/lib/snapd/desktop

So I suspect my issue is the facts that the snapd directory is listed three times, and it is separated by spaces.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could fix this? I suspect, but am not certain that this is the issue.

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04, using fish shell.

I've found THIS post showing a possible solution, and upon running sudo ag "XDG_DATA_DIRS=" / 2>/dev/null | grep -v snap (and waiting a while) I got the following output (minus a few auth.log references which I've removed) Apologies for the big, possibly irreverent, "data dump"

/etc/profile.d/xdg_dirs_desktop_session.sh:4:DEFAULT_XDG_DATA_DIRS='/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/'
/etc/profile.d/xdg_dirs_desktop_session.sh:18:       XDG_DATA_DIRS="$DEFAULT_XDG_DATA_DIRS"
/etc/profile.d/xdg_dirs_desktop_session.sh:21:       XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/"$DESKTOP_SESSION":"$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
/etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh:12:    export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share:/usr/share"
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/55gnome-session_gnomerc:17:      XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/55gnome-session_gnomerc:19:      XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/gnome:"$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/60x11-common_xdg_path:5:DEFAULT_XDG_DATA_DIRS='/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/'
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/60x11-common_xdg_path:17:       XDG_DATA_DIRS="$DEFAULT_XDG_DATA_DIRS"
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/60x11-common_xdg_path:20:       XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/"$DESKTOP_SESSION":"$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
/usr/share/doc/gnome-software/README.md:24:$ XDG_DATA_DIRS=install/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS ./install/bin/gnome-software

I'm not certain I have found the correct places to think about updating the environment variable, as none of these referenced /var/lib/snaped/desktop...And this might not be the issue causing the problem at all! Any help would be welcome!

James Harrison
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5 Answers5

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You are running into https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1957948 which will require a fix in snapd.

Using a different shell as your login shell, and then executing fish once it has started, is the right workaround.

Zanchey
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I am also having the same problem (suddenly Firefox disappeared in Gnome Shell) and I'm using Ubuntu 21.10 with fish shell. And just like you I could not figure out what caused this XDG_DATA_DIRS modification with the separation by spaces. Because you apparently also use fish I tried switching back to bash as login shell (chsh -s /bin/bash), rebooted and voila, the desktop files are loaded again. After that I set fish as the command to start with in gnome-terminal.

TLDR: My quickfix/workaround was chsh -s /bin/bash to switch to bash as login shell (instead of fish) and reboot.

benediktg
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After following Zanchy's links and reading around the issue I found the solution here!!!

I needed to replace set XDG_DATA_DIRS $XDG_DATA_DIRS $snap_xdg_path with set XDG_DATA_DIRS $XDG_DATA_DIRS:$snap_xdg_path in /usr/share/fish/vendor_conf.d/snapd.fish

Update: After another update I found my snaped.fish file had reverted, and I needed to edit it again - so this solution may need to be re-applied until fish updates it's snap?

James Harrison
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  • Wonderful! I've been looking for this solution for several days now. I think this solved the missing desktop applications in Ubuntu when using fish as my default shell – dsagman Feb 20 '22 at 01:30
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I had the same problem on Linux Lite 6.0 (basically same as Ubuntu 22.04). Snap applications (Spotify, Prospect Mail) would not show up our could not even be found when searching for them. Just logging out and back in again put the application shortcuts in the Menu and all worked fine.

Evert Homan
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You have to install snap-store:

sudo snap install snap-store

Then Log Out or reboot your linux pc. Then your issue will be solved.

S Sidharth
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