Installing PWAs - Flatpak has no write access

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Hello!

When trying to install a PWA from Google Chrome, I got an error saying that the Flatpak does not have write access to two locations, so it cannot create shortcuts for the PWA:
PWA-flatpak-has-no-write-access-to
(screenshot made by @Aqualung, taken from the topic linked below)

There is an existing topic about this, however, for me, the error message kept appearing, no matter which solution I used. Please have a quick look here: PWAs: This Flatpak does not have write access to

In order to give access to these locations to the Google Chrome flatpak, we can use Flatseal or the flatpak override CLI command as mentioned in the other post:

flatpak override --user --filesystem=~/.local/share/applications --filesystem=~/.local/share/icons com.google.Chrome

These overrides added in the CLI will appear in Flatseal too, in the “Filesystem / Other files” section, so both solutions will do the same thing.

The error message did not go away after setting the overrides, because the ~/.local/share/icons folder was missing from my system, so I had to create it manually. After doing that, the message went away and all shortcuts appeared as expected.

Another thing to note is that, although all my flatpaks are installed system-wide by default (--system), I have added the filesystem overrides only for my user (--user).

Useful commands

  • double-check where are my overrides saved (--system is default, but --user is handled separately):
    flatpak override --user --show com.google.Chrome
    flatpak override --system --show com.google.Chrome

  • reset all overrides either from --user or --system:
    flatpak override --user --reset com.google.Chrome
    sudo flatpak override --system --reset com.google.Chrome

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2

You can avoid that by adding :create to the permissions, e.g. ~/.local/share/icons:create

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