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!
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?