Flatpak apps can’t access where Ubuntu mounts network shares by default.

This one took me a while to figure out, but I think I understand what is going on. Ubuntu’s file explorer mounts SMB shares under /run/user/1000/gvfs/..., specifically my handbrake SMB share is mounted under /run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server=servername,share=handbrake/ and that links to /home/username/handbrake/, but Flatpak blacklists filesystem access to /run. The fix was to mount the network share via the CLI instead of Nautilus.

I ended up mounting the file share via a script I copied from here.

mount -t cifs -o uid=<linuxuser>,username=<serveruser> //<serverip>/handbrake /media/handbrake

Then I installed cifs-utils and made the script executable. I’ll just run it before I run my Handbrake scripts.

It was very confusing problem because powershell (my scripting language of choice) could see the files, and the HandbrakeGUI (which is also Flatpak) worked without any problems, so all my troubleshooting tests were successful. I know Ubuntu is all about snaps, not flatpaks, so maybe a different distro would be easier to work with.