Searched for a few weeks and could not find any solid solution. Found a KDE thread that said it was a issue with flatpak but I don’t even have flatpak installed. Others say it’s Wayland, Do non KDE users on wayland get this too?
I know it’s for security but it’s too damned annoying to be worth it! Should I setup a tiling WM and be done with it? It really is that bad.
All I want to do is play Skyrim without seeing this every 15 minutes!
Ok so I’ve run into this bug frequently with my Steam Deck for the past 2 years.
The following is my possibly innacurate, but genuine attempt to best describe whats going:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490666
Its a KDE bug that is specific to how KDE handles GTK (2 and 3?) in Wayland.
It is not a bug with Wayland. It is not a bug with GTK.
GNOME doesn’t seem to have this problem.
Its existed for about 3 years, the thread I linked above shows some of the explanation of how/why its occuring… even though this particular bug report is only a few months old, you can find it recurring further back in the past.
Here’s some more bug threads:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480412
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/remote-control-requested-every-time-i-use-kde-connect-remote-control/175083
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/issues/6
Basically, in an attempt to make remote access/control permissions for GTK to work properly in KDE Wayland, KDE implemented what multiple KDE developers have themselves described as a ‘hack’, a temporary, quick fix solution, in various comments on forums.
EDIT// Here’s an example of a KDE dev outright stating this, from the first thread:
The rest of that thread is another KDE dev pushing hotfixes, interspersed with others saying that the problem persists.
//
Unsuprisingly, having a quick fix hack as an underlying, integral part of an entire DE, is not a good idea, as it doesn’t actually solve the problem except in very specific situations, and causes mass confusion downstream.
The problem has persisted for years because… as far as I can tell, to fix it properly would require a significant rewrite of KDE’s entire permission model, and also as far as i can tell, this has yet to be done.
The problem originally was pretty rare and thus I guess low priority, but as more and more people are trying to use KDE Wayland and a console controller or Steam Deck or gamescope or something like that, you can find more and more people complaining about it.
The devs seem to keep thinking they’ve fixed it, over 2024, only to find… no, they have not.
There is no functional ‘fix’, outside of switching back to X11, not until KDE gets its shit together.
For me on a Steam Deck, wanting to be able to use it as a gaming device and a PC, I switched over to the GNOME flavor of Bazzite, all problems solved.
This feature hasn’t existed for years, it’s quite new.
This has absolutely nothing to do with GTK or system trays, and it is in no way or form specific to KDE Plasma or a bug in it. It’s an Xwayland feature that was poorly thought out and that’s challenging to work around.
… Ok.
So, Wayland cannot actually directly allow input events to access the system directly.
It instead passes them off, as a request for access, to xdg-desktop-portal, which prompts the user with an access request.
This should only occur once, user hits ‘grant access’ and then the system remembers this.
(Note that this is a fairly significant problem on its own if the user does not have a mouse and keyboard, such as on a game deck, in situations where the user has no actual way to give inputs that are not moderated by an app)
But instead, it keeps recurring, the system doesn’t remember properly, it’ll work for a bit, and then ask again.
The reporting of bugs I’ve seen like this goes back to around 3 years ago, when people/distros/DEs started to switch and then default to wayland.
What I’ve also seen is far less bug reports from gnome users than kde users, and in at least my own experience, switching to gnome completely solved the ‘constantly re-requesting access’ problem.
It doesn’t fix the problem of ‘how do you grant access the first time if you don’t have a mouse and keyboard’.
So… it seems to me that the more technically accurate thing to say would be:
Because gnome wayland seems to at least remember the granted access once you figure out how to give it once, kde wayland does not.
This seems like the most complete reasoning for what is going on. Since waiting for kde to fix things takes years while the concentrate on pushing new features maybe it would be best to test Hyperland to see if it suffers from this issue. Since it is a security protocol in wayland and I saw a gnome user in this thread is also suffering from this issue it may be present in Hyperland as well.
Honestly I hope this doesn’t happen in Hyperland too as I’m really looking forward to trying it out, been missing i3 allot lately, and it might inspire me to get back to my coding projects I’ve been putting off for no good reason.
There seems to be allot of workarounds in this thread for me to go through and test.
Thanks for the info. I appreciate it!
Please actually do test hyprland and post it, if you can.
I am frankly baffled that such a common issue has been going on for years now and no one has seemingly 100% fixed it… yet every distro targeted at a steam deck or other handheld, which doesn’t have a kb+m unless you also have a dock and a kb+m, seems to have gone with wayland, and are just pretending this doesn’t functionally cripple your handheld in desktop mode.
Its somehow worse than stickykeys prompt in windows alt tabbing your game: this will lock up your entire control scheme, and seemingly can’t actually be permanently fixed or turned off.
My suspicion is that the initial pop up still happens in gnome, but in kde, when you click the grant access prompt… it doesn’t actually permanently give the permission; some amount of time or sets of sequences of events will reset the granted access and then lock you out and re-prompt you.