SUMMARY The implementation of running in the background makes it hard to use, or maybe I'm not smart enough to figure this out. There seem to be a couple of problems with it, that now render one of the applications I want to use seemingly useless. Here are the issues I ran into: 1. The notification popup about running something in the background doesn't seem to state which application it even refers to. Even if it did, there doesn't seem to be any obvious button contained in the popup either to get to the window in case the name itself would be unclear. 2. The notification popup is obnoxious after seeing it 20 times with seemingly no obvious way to configure it. For example, it doesn't have any obvious distinction between "Allow this time" and "Allow always for this app", no obvious distinction between "Allow and don't tell me again in the future for this app" and "Allow but tell me in the future", no obvious button to get me to a settings dialog where I can change this for all apps or see my past decisions on that, ... (There is a button that got me to a settings dialog but it seems to have been about ways notifications are displayed in general and not related to the running in the background permission.) 3. When I click the notification there's this dialog with "Allow" button comes up, and when I just close it since I find the choices presented to be unhelpful and somewhat unclear, not only does the portal seem to decide that means deny (which I'm not sure how that would be an obvious conclusion given if I don't prompt this dialog to start with that's not treated as a deny ether), but also the portal seems to decide that it means ALWAYS deny, and that I must not be shown any way to review or change that in the future either. This now broke one of the applications I want to use and feels fairly frustrating to me. I might have missed something however. My apologies if I just missed the obvious way how to configure this that works. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Try to use/deal with the running in the background portal notifications OBSERVED RESULT The confusion listed above EXPECTED RESULT Some more understandable interface which lists more details. Or maybe it's just me, in that case I apologize SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: plasmashell 5.27.10 (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: plasmashell 5.27.10 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.113.0 Qt Version: 5.15.11 and/or 6 (both installed) ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
After some more digging, I found System Settings > Applications > Flatpak Permission Settings > Flatpak Applications > Permissions. There doesn't seem to be any background permission listed. That makes no sense to me, since seemingly it exists and somehow it was just changed and stored on disk somehow.
For any other confused users: the required permission is available to review and change after you install "com.github.tchx84.Flatseal" from flathub and then browse to the affected application, and it's called "Background" with rather confusing "Set and enabled", "Set and disabled", and "Unset" values that in practice seem to correspond to "Always allowed and don't ever ask or notify me", "Forbidden and don't ever ask or notify me", and "Allowed but notify me".
The notification has been removed in 6.0.