On Thursday, July 16, 2020 1:22:59 PM EDT stan via users wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 11:53:41 -0400 "Garry T. Williams" gtwilliams@gmail.com wrote:
A few weeks ago I installed F32-KDE fresh on a workstation (a disk drive failed). All of a sudden last night Portal service was started (whatever that is). I did nothing that I know of to trigger this. Furthermore, since updating after installing this system, that service has never been started until now.
Directly after the Portal service started, I see error messages coming from pipewire (whatever that is).
xdg-desktop-portal.x86_64 : Portal frontend service to flatpak
Summary : Media Sharing Server Description : PipeWire is a multimedia server for Linux and other Unix like operating systems.
Thank you, Stan. Of course, those descriptions do very little to allow me to understand what this stuff is. Web searches (which I did do after seeing the log messages) indicate that this stuff is about *sharing* desktops. I cannot imagine why this stuff starts up a little after midnight local time, when I did not do anything to indicate that I wanted to share my desktop. And with whom?! Very strange, indeed.
Can anyone tell me what this is all about and why it happens now?
I don't know for sure, but it looks like Portal monitors sites (like flathub) on the web, and when there are updates, launches itself and pipewire. There is probably a default conf file somewhere that controls its behavior.
Hmmm. I used to be in charge of what got updated and when it got updated on my own machine. You indicate that there's another path with which to install software that I am no longer in charge of. That's alarming. Especially since I didn't ask for it.
Since it is a systemd service (from your output), you should be able to mask it if you never want it to run. That will probably take care of pipewire starting as well.
I knew how to do do that, but thank you.
I went one better and simply removed those two packages from my system. If, for any reason it turns out I later need them, I can reinstall them.
Erasing xdg-desktop-portal offered to erase a bunch of leaves no longer needed, including flatpak. My system's 150 MB smaller now. :-)
It seems that a lot of dependencies were not installed with it, as all the failures attest. If you want to use it, you should probably reinstall it so the necessary dependencies for it to function are pulled in.
Well, there's the odd thing, isn't it. Before, dnf would always solve dependencies and install them when a package was installed. Now there seems to be another path used for software installation and it doesn't know how to handle dependencies. I don't guess I need this stuff, for sure.
Thanks again for the reply.