Flatpak issues with gnome keyring after Crimson update

Ni! Update to Crimson was quite smooth, except for one thing : flatpaks that kept secrets in the Gnome keyring started complaining about an incorrect secret, and the application would refuse to start. For me this happened with Authenticator, Flare and Fractal.

I found a solution to the problem and thought it was worth documenting it here. It was caused by the way flatpak communicates with more recent gnome-keyring, using a portal, which wasn’t the case before. That is explained in detail here:

So, the way I solved the issue was to:

  1. Disable gnome-keyring-daemon, to stop the “Secret” portal
    • systemctl --user stop gnome-keyring-daemon
  2. Start the affected apps, which will work because there’s no portal
  3. Backup any data you may need to preserve (I exported my Authenticator keys)
  4. Remove the apps, purging their data
    • flatpak uninstall --delete-data ${package}
  5. Install seahorse (aka “Passwords and Keys”) and remove any keys created by the affected apps from all keyrings
  6. Restart gnome-keyring-daemon
    • systemctl --user start gnome-keyring-daemon
  7. Reinstall the apps and import the backed up data

Took me a while to figure out what was happening, so I hope this can save you the trouble.

Cheers!

6 Likes