Recently, I had an issue running Geary on Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit, which now employs labwc as compositor for Wayland. Earlier, this used to be handled by Openbox with X11 as backend.
Long story short, I had to switch to X11 for the Gnome Online Accounts window to appear so that I could put in my details. The same window would not show up using labwc.
I understand that GTK4 / GNOME apps are developed to work with mutter. And since RPi OS is going to stick with labwc, does that mean that GTK4 / GNOME apps will not work as well as with mutter?
GTK applications are developed to work with any Wayland compositor.
GNOME applications are developed to work with GNOME, which means a specific set of Wayland protocols must be functional.
This is not really “an app”: you’re using Geary, which is still using GTK3 and is not a core GNOME application. Geary, for better or worse, depends on GNOME Online Accounts, which is a core GNOME component. GNOME Online Accounts is only meant to be used in a GNOME session, and not elsewhere—not in the least because it has access to GNOME credentials for online services.
On top of that, looking at the original topic, you’re using an older version of GNOME Online Accounts, which requires the xdg-foreign protocol in order to parent the embedded web view used for authentication; newer versions of GNOME Online Accounts launch the default web browser, so they should have fewer issues.
So, to sum up:
Geary is/was targeting GNOME, but it’s not part of it
Geary is also currently unmaintained, so it’s still using legacy dependencies like GTK3
Geary depends on a GNOME Online Accounts, a core GNOME component
core GNOME components have no expectations of running outside of GNOME
you’re using an older version of GNOME Online Accounts, paired with an unmaintained application, in an unsupported platform
There’s nothing GTK or GNOME can do about any of this.
You should ask RPi OS to not ship GNOME Online Accounts, which would remove Geary as well, and avoid people getting a bad user experience.
