Hi, I’m using gnome with archlinux (kernel 5.10.6, gnome shell 3.38.2). I wanted to try gnome-software flatpak apps instead of system packages for some apps. My issue is that none of the apps downloaded through gnome-software show in the activities applications. For example, I installed inkscape with gnome-software, and there doesn’t seem to be any .desktop entry created in /usr/share/applications/ or ~/.local/share/applications/ for it.
What should I do to have them show up in the activities applications? I suppose I don’t have to create manual .desktop entries.
Thank you @alatiera and @pwithnall for the links. That is indeed the problem. I need to have /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share in the environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS. And as explained by the link of @pwithnall this variable is set by the script /etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh installed with flatpak. The only issue is that this script is not loaded for me since my user shell is fish.
I’ve been trying to find a decent solution to that problem (scripts in /etc/profile.d/ not read) but it doesn’t seem like there is a good solution to it (cf Fish not reading /etc/profile in TTY · Issue #3665 · fish-shell/fish-shell · GitHub). This means that by default, flatpak/gnome-software integration with non posix shell isn’t very good, and it seems weird that changing of shell would change behavior of your desktop environment. If I switch back to bash as a user shell, the applications show up, so I consider this solved. Thanks.