Calibre Flatpak Doesn't Work on Bazzite (Fedora?) 44

[enuddleyarbl]

I'm pretty sure this is an OS issue and not a Calibre issue (plus the Calibre flatpak is not official).

The Calibre flatpak (v 9.7.0) no longer runs on Bazzite 44.20260501.1. When I click on the icon to run it, I get a little bouncing icon of the Calibre icon that moves with the mouse, then nothing. If I revert back to Bazzite 43.20260420 and Calibre runs normally again.

I thought I'd ask if others are having the same issue. I'm especially interested if others are seeing it on Fedora 44 (since Bazzite is based on Fedora) and these OSes have both just moved from version 43 to version 44.

EDIT: and here's a link to the Bazzite issue I started on it:

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/...sue-4373663905

[PeterT]

Why use a flatpak version rather than the official Linux release?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Why use a flatpak version rather than the official Linux release?

Because some like to make things very much more difficult for themselves then they actually have to.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because some like to make things very much more difficult for themselves then they actually have to.

I think the problem is rather that Bazzite is an immutable distribution.

[enuddleyarbl]

Since people have brought up native versions, if you're running Calibre natively on Bazzite or Fedora 44, does that run correctly? As @rantanplan mentioned, Bazzite is immutable (i.e., atomic) and the Bazzite application packaging is flatpak. So, that's why I'm asking about that. But, I'd also like to know if native Calibre is faulting on the new version 44 OSes.

EDIT: The weird thing about this is that flatpaks are supposed to run on any Linux distribution. So, I can't see how changing from Bazzite 43 to Bazzite 44 could cause any issues in that one flatpak. If there were a problem for ALL flatpaks, I could understand it. But, that's the only one I'm having problems with (so far).

[PeterT]

For what it's worth (probably zero) I installed flatpak on my WSL2 envionment on Windows 11; installed the calibre flatpak and had no issues.

[PeterT]

And I installed Bazzite 44 under Oracle Virtual Box. Again NO issue with calibre.

[enuddleyarbl]

I'm assuming you installed the real Calibre via the Calibre web site using the "isolated" install:

wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin install_dir=~/calibre-bin isolated=y

and not the flatpak. Thanks. That's good to know. I'll add that to my bug reports on Bazzite's github page and the Calibre flatpak's github page.

EDIT: After re-reading your post, now I wondering if my assumption was wrong and you installed the flatpak. If so, I'm really worried. When I first ran into this problem, I even un-installed the flatpak and re-installed it. Same problem.

[PeterT]

I installed the flatpak both times; in the WSL environment and in the Bazzite environment under VirtualBox.

[enuddleyarbl]

EDIT: SOLVED! Thanks @PeterT ! With what you said, above, I started messing with the Flatseal changes I documented below. I should have realized it was my old friend Wayland. They must have changed something with Wayland in this version and Calibre now works with the Wayland stuff turned on and doesn't work with it turned off (in Flatseal). I turned the Wayland Windowing System back on and got rid of that xcb environment variable and the Calibre flatpack started working again. Yay! Thanks again. And, I'll pass that information up to the powers that be at Bazzite and the flatpak site.

OP: OK. I guess I've got to do some more troubleshooting. So, I can narrow things down:

- Which flavor of Bazzite did you install? KDE or Gnome? Desktop mode or Steam Gaming Mode? (I'm using KDE, Desktop).
- Did you make any changes to the flatpak environment with Flatseal? To get my old version running, I had to turn off the Wayland Windowing System, turn on GPU Acceleration, and add the QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb environment variable (all within Flatseal).

[PeterT]

I believe I installed the KDE / Non-Steam-Gaming-Desktop mode. I made zero changes to the flatpak in either test that I did.

It's worth notimg that VirtualBox does NOT pass the GPU through to the created instance of Bazzite, so as far as Bazzite is concerned I simply have a (S)VGA card attached.