Any plans to move away from xdg-desktop-portal-gnome?

[coatlessali]

Niri has been great in the few months I have been using it, but I do have one thing I don't really like: xdg-desktop-portal-gnome pulls gnome-desktop as a dependency, and I'd like to get away from it if possible. Are there any plans to implement niri's own portal, or support other portals?

[YaLTeR]

There are no plans because, well, I'm a single person with limited free time, and a portal would be a whole separate project to maintain. Though, another argument for a niri portal is to expose more unusual screencast options, like workspace screencasting.

pulls gnome-desktop as a dependency

Why is this a problem? It's a small utility library: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/

[Piroro-hs]

I think that the real problem of xdp-gnome is its libx11 dependency. (Sorry for necrobumping)

[YaLTeR]

xdp-gtk probably also has that, and that's the fallback impl that will always be used for some portals.

[nebulosa2007]

Btw, on ArchLinux you could choose which portal you prefer to use: xdg-desktop-portal-impl (xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, xdg-desktop-portal-kde, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, xdg-desktop-portal-xapp, xdg-desktop-portal-dde, xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic, xdg-desktop-portal-kde, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome)

Niri package

So author should ask a maintainer for dependencies update

[YaLTeR]

niri depends on xdp-gnome for screencasting. No other portals will work (except maybe -wlr).

[coatlessali]

Decided to test all of the ones that support screencasting. Here are the results:

• xdg-desktop-portal-wlr results in a flickery, unusable mess that updates every 3 seconds or so and rapidly flickers between two frames.
• xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland results in smooth video, but repeating previous frames and flickering as a result.
• Everything else doesn't work at all. No selection menu appears, properties on pipewire screencasting in OBS are inaccessible.

My actual issue isn't necessarily gnome-desktop as I had originally thought - didn't bother to check and that's my bad. The actual issue I have is that xdg-desktop-portal-gnome is dependent on nautilus. It's really not actually a big deal though. Going to see if I can change the default file picker by editing the portals file.

[YaLTeR]

Removing FileChooser from /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/gnome.portal will probably make it fall back to the xdp-gtk built-in file chooser, without nautilus.

[Yaroslav-95]

I really dislike the nautilus/gnome file chooser for several reasons, among them being the fact that it starts some localsearch process that I don't need because I don't use nautilus, it's very sluggish and constantly crashes on me. So I solved it for me by adding the following line to /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/niri-portals.conf:

org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser=gtk;

Now apps in my setup open what is, IMHO, a way more sane file chooser that just works™.