Unable to start Pix in COSMIC Desktop, DBUS error.

Open

#238 opened on Jan 4, 2026 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 4/5
Estimated time: 3-5 days
Newbie friendliness: 35/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: arch-linux, c, linux
Domain: desktop, operating-systems

Research direction

Reproduce the crash by running pix on Arch Linux with COSMIC Desktop, and capture the DBus portal warning and libpng error from the terminal. Start by tracing the startup path around the reported org.freedesktop.portal.Inhibit failure and the subsequent abort. Done means Pix opens the home-directory file window and remains running.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Distribution

Arch Linux, 20251231

Package version

3.4.9

Frequency

Always

Bug description

Note: This is a new development on my end. I'd been using Pix since early 2025 without trouble.

I updated my system to the latest and greatest of everything on 31 December 2025 to give the COSMIC Desktop a try and discovered that Pix starts up for only a second or two (displaying the file window for my home directory) before crashing. Running Pix from the command line results in the following output:

{15:48:52 @ Sun Jan 04}
[drwho @ windbringer ~] () $ pix

(pix:990593): Gtk-WARNING **: 15:51:09.668: Creating a portal monitor failed:
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface
“org.freedesktop.portal.Inhibit” on object at path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop
libpng error: Read Error
Aborted                    (core dumped) pix

I've been able to reproduce this with v3.4.9 as well as v3.4.4 from Git.

Steps to reproduce

Open a terminal window.
pix

Expected behavior

Pix should start up, display the file selector window for $HOME, and not crash.

Additional information

No response

Dominant language: C
Stars: 270
Forks: 47
PR merge metrics: No merged PRs in 30d

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