Signal can't be re-run if one of the standard HOME dirs (e.g. ~/Documents) is a symlink about signal-desktop HOT 3 CLOSED

This is fixed in the latest version. Thanks for reporting this!

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oh wtf, this explains my problems with this snap. Signal just stopped starting some time ago.

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FWIW I have an extremely hacky workaround, that's been successfully working for me for the past couple of weeks. It requires at least one of the standard xdg-user-dirs being in its standard location and not being a symlink. For definiteness, let's take ~/Downloads as the directory that's not a symlink (but it could be one of the others, though probably not Public or Templates).

1. Edit ~/snap/signal-desktop/current/.config/user-dirs.dirs replacing the locations of the symlinked directories with the location of the directory that isn't a symlink. For example, replace what would normally be:

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"

with:

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"

2. Remove all the currently existing non-hidden symlinks in ~/snap/signal-desktop/current/.

3. Run signal-desktop.

(I hope that I haven't forgotten about any steps, since I did it a while ago.)

The point is to cheat whatever apparmor (?) confinement policies are there, by passing a set of paths that can be definitely accessed, by whatever it is that needs to access the home dirs.

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