Bug 508435 - KDE Portal's screen sharing permission is persistent and cannot be reset, preventing screen re-selection in Krfb on Wayland.
Summary: KDE Portal's screen sharing permission is persistent and cannot be reset, pre...
Status: REPORTED
Alias: None
Product: krfb
Classification: Applications
Component: general (other bugs)
Version First Reported In: unspecified
Platform: Arch Linux Linux
: NOR minor
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: George Goldberg
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2025-08-18 18:21 UTC by gabrielrodriguescordeiro
Modified: 2025-08-18 18:21 UTC (History)
0 users

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Description gabrielrodriguescordeiro 2025-08-18 18:21:01 UTC
Summary of the Problem:
When using Krfb on a KDE Plasma Wayland session with multiple monitors, the XDG Desktop Portal permission for screen sharing becomes persistent and is impossible to reset through standard user actions. After granting permission to share a specific screen once, the portal no longer presents the screen selection dialog on subsequent attempts. This makes it impossible to switch which screen is being shared (e.g., switching from the primary monitor to a virtual monitor), rendering multi-monitor sharing scenarios unusable. This persistent state survives application restarts, session restarts (logout/login), and even the manual deletion of all known user-level configuration and state files.

Steps to Reproduce:
- On a system with two or more monitors (in my case, one physical and one vkms virtual monitor), log into a KDE Plasma Wayland session.
- Verify that both monitors are active and arranged in "Extend" mode in the Display Configuration settings.
- Launch Krfb.
- Check the "Enable Desktop Sharing" box.
- The first portal dialog appears: "Remote control requested". Check the box "Allow restoring on future sessions" and click "Share".
- A second portal dialog appears, asking to choose which screen to share. Selected the primary monitor (e.g., Screen 1, eDP-1).
- The VNC session starts, correctly sharing the primary monitor.
- Stop the share by unchecking "Enable Desktop Sharing" in the Krfb window.
- Attempt to start a new share by re-checking the "Enable Desktop Sharing" box.

Observed Behavior:
The share starts immediately, streaming the primary monitor again. The second portal dialog (the one for screen selection) does not appear. It is no longer possible to choose the secondary (Virtual-1) monitor.

Expected Behavior:
The screen selection dialog should appear every time a new share is initiated to select what type of screen share you want (duplicate, extended, etc.) or there should be a clear and functional way for the user to reset this permission to be prompted again.

Extensive Troubleshooting Steps Performed (What did NOT work):
To solve this "stuck" permission, we attempted a comprehensive series of resets, none of which forced the screen selection dialog to reappear:
- Toggling the "Enable Desktop Sharing" checkbox multiple times.
- Closing and relaunching the Krfb application.
- Logging out of the Plasma session and logging back in.
- A full system reboot.
- Manually deleting all known configuration and state files related to Krfb and the portal, followed by a reboot. This included:
~/.config/krfbrc
~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal-kderc
~/.local/state/krfbstaterc
~/.local/state/xdg-desktop-portal-kdestaterc
- Deleting the krfb entry from the KDE Wallet Manager (kwalletmanager).

Even after a "Full Reset" (deleting all the files above), Krfb would still restore its previous state (except when the kwalletmanager folder was deleted where the password configured in krfb was reset, but the screen selection options menu still did not appear) and would not show the screen selection dialog after the initial permission request.
This appears to be a bug in how the KDE Desktop Portal handles permission persistence for screen sharing, making it impossible to reset a user's choice.

I hope this detailed report, including the extensive troubleshooting steps performed, is helpful in diagnosing this persistent behavior.

Thank you for all your hard work on Krfb and the entire KDE Plasma ecosystem. It's an incredibly powerful and useful tool, and I greatly appreciate the effort that goes into its development.

Please let me know if any further information or testing is required from my end.

Best regards,
Gabriel

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Arch Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0
Qt Version: 6.9.1
Kernel Version: 6.16.1-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland