Timeshift broken under Wayland?

Support Software & Applications
1

Suddenly Timeshift is unable to browse snapshots. I has never had a problem before and the change was recent and I did have issues with the updates that have come out in the past weeks.

I’m posting this query under KDE because I suspect there was a recent change with regards to X11 and Wayland recently. I really, really thought I had been running X11 but my recent activity in trying to chase down oddities such as this Timeshift issue I saw that apparently I am now running Wayland. Looking here in the support messages, if I understand correctly, one of the recent updates causes Wayland to takeover for anyone who had been running X…….

In the logs when I attempt to browse the snapshots in Timeshift I see the following message in the log:

Running as root is not supported. Consider running nautilus admin:/// instead.

Through the rumour mill my understanding is that Wayland doesn’t support a lot of the functionality X has and many applications, such a remote access and such do not work, and apparently aren’t to be addressed…… so this message is pretty much a security issue and I believe the remote desktop stuff is due to security…….

I wouldn’t think anyone here would know about Timeshift but if I can determine when was the update which would have unknowingly switched me to Wayland, I think that pretty much would tell me all I need to know?

Thanks in advance

2

It works fine here for me — no errors at all.

They do. You can use a remote desktop client, and you can have individual windows forwarded to another machine by way of waypipe.

That would have been the 2025.12.08 update. We went from Plasma 6.3.6 to 6.5.3, and Plasma has been defaulting to Wayland since upstream released Plasma 6.4.

Also, as of Plasma 6.8, X11 will no longer be supported, and Wayland will be the only way to go.

I would advise you to log out completely — you have to be looking at the login screen — and then switch over to a tty, log in there as yourself, and empty your cache. :backhand_index_pointing_down:

rm -rf .cache/*

Then, for good measure, reboot.

3

I can’t replicate that issue on my Plasma Wayland (Testing branch) system, which is currently the same version of Plasma as Stable branch:

Although I do wonder why you are receiving a message regarding nautilus, when timeshift browsing on Plasma should default to using dolphin.

1 Like
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You know you can see which stuff was updated with timestamps:

/var/log/pacman.log

I remember there was a timeshift bug in the past (around ~2 year’s ago maybe), where many user’s also couldn’t start Timeshift under Plasma.

Since then, i saved this few commands in my Linux command txt file:

Timeshift Backup in CLI creation (if GUI is buggy):
sudo timeshift --create --comments "A new backup"

Timeshift Backup in CLI restore (if GUI is buggy):
sudo timeshift --restore

5

Yes, but that was an upstream bug in the gtk GUI of timeshift.

There isn’t anything wrong with the current one, though. As the matter of fact, I’ve already made a full system backup with it right after updating my system.

6

6 posts were split to a new topic: Afraid to update

7

Thank you Aragorn for the quik response.

I tried your recommendation clearing the .cache directory, via a virtual tty and then rebooting… but it made no difference. That said, if your thought was a bad definition in a config file or environment variable setting… then I think you may be on to something.

Being the master of not seeing the obvious…. I noticed the error message said “nautilus”….it registered with me that’s Gnomes file browser and since I’m on KDE I assume it should have called out dolphin.

In short I believe the issue may be related to the command “xdg-open”. Apparently that’s a utility which will pass the request to the appropriate application for the desktop your on. So in the binary where they pass “xdg-open <dir_path.” to the OS, xdg-open is supposed to hand it over to dolphin.

As an attempt to test and perhaps see if there might be some clue I used a line of code found in the timeshift-launch bash script in order to issue the xdg-open command from the same environment the binary would be issuing it.

Here is my test:

[dee@zor ts]$ su - -c “pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY xdg-open /home/dee”
Password:
[0.049] [glfw error 65544]: Failed to connect to DBUS session bus. DBUS error: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead
[0.152] [glfw error 65544]: Failed to connect to DBUS session bus. DBUS error: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead
[0.155] Failed to open systemd user bus with error: No medium found

If I do the same thing but exchange xdg-open with dolphin it works by running dolphin on my users display from a root process……

So…. I haven’t explored the dbus errors but on the surface the messages indicate it’s likely to be something undefined or misdefined. So I think you were close….

Thank you for your help and my apologies for not having noticed “nautilus” …. I think I didn’t realize that timeshift was simply bringing up dolphin…so it took a minute to ask myself what did nautilus have to do with anything….

again thanks

9

Well, creating a new User account (for testing purposes) is one obvious way to rule out local configuration errors – or, confirm them. :sweat_smile:

Let us know if these issues persist in a new account.

Regards.