1 minute, 39 seconds

The tl;dr

Set a flatpak env variable and run a CLI call to grant permissions. Jump down to “the fix” at the bottom to see how or read on for a little backstory!

The quest

For a while now I’ve been really loving daily driving Bluefin on both my laptop and my desktop. However, one of my biggest complaints, coming from running Xorg, is that my very most favorite screenshot utility doesn’t work on the desktop: Flameshot. Easily installed via a flatpak, it either errors out prompting on permissions or looks like it’s gonna launch but doesn’t. Strangely, I found It Just Works™ on my laptop which led me to think it was multi-monitor issue as my desktop is three up affair ( | | — if you must know).

Sure enough, there’s an issue “[Wayland KDE] Flameshot doesn’t capture full desktop w/ multi-monitor“. While I’m not on KDE (Gnome is default on Bluefin), this very much applies to me. I’ve been following the issue for months and little updates have been trickling in.

Every now and again I try the work-arounds and they never work. Then today I was doing some work which required arrows on screenshots, the absolute happiest of paths for Flameshot. I thought I’d fumble through with some of the work-arounds to see if any of them worked.

Surprise surprise, I made two changes and it works! I’ll keep this post updated, because some times things change and it breaks, but as of right now, it just works works. Here’s a screenshot with like a bazillion arrows (remember, it works!! happy path!!) with some relevant versions:

(for the SEO types, thats: Gnome 47, OS Build 839d9ce, Bluefin (Version: gts-41.20250421 / FROM Fedora Silverblue 41) and Bluefin (Version: gts-41.20250421 / FROM Fedora Silverblue 41), Flameshot v12.1.0 () Compiled with Qt 5.15.15)

The fix

This was so easy – I set an environment variable (I used Flatseal, but you do you) and then ran a permission:

• Permission on the CLI (should be one time): flatpak permission-set screenshot screenshot org.flameshot.Flameshot yes
• Env variable to add to Flatseal: QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb

Thanks to all the kind souls who have been debugging this and finding work-arounds. I hope this blog post finds some else for whom It Just Works™.