RakuOS Software Center (rakuos-software-gtk) fails to open on Niri Image, RakuOS Bug Tracker

Report: RakuOS Software Center ("rakuos-software-gtk") fails to open

Date: 2026-09-21 | Reporter: end user | Investigated: opencode session (able to reproduce end-to-end)

Problem

rakuos-software-gtk is installed (/usr/libexec/rakuos/software/rakuos-software-gtk) but "Add/Remove Software" never opened a window. Launches appeared to do nothing.

Analysis / reproduction

Fresh launches work. Running the binary (or the /usr/bin/rakuos-software launcher) directly opened a window fine — so the binary itself was sound.
Suspect: login autostart. /etc/xdg/autostart/rakuos-software-tray.desktop runs /usr/bin/rakuos-software --tray at every login. Running the launcher with --tray reproduced the exact break: the GTK binary rejects --tray (Unknown option --tray) but keeps running headless, and once that hidden instance is alive it claims the org.rakuos.Software D-Bus singleton, so any later launcher click only pings a windowless zombie and never shows UI.
Deeper root cause (after a first workaround still failed): the tray daemon itself (rakuos-software-tray) spawns a headless GTK UI child ~15 s after login. That child, not the --tray flag alone, is what permanently owns the D-Bus name. The zombie is startup-only — it is not respawned when windows close — but it persists for the whole login session.
Single-instance activation (org.freedesktop.Application.Activate) against the resident did nothing — confirming the zombie could not be woken, only killed.

Fix applied (user-level override, no base-image change)

The XDG autostart hierarchy lets a user file shadow the system one. Created ~/.config/autostart/rakuos-software-tray.desktop with:

Hidden=true
X-systemd-skip=true
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false

systemctl --user daemon-reload confirmed the generated [email protected] no longer exists, so the software-center tray no longer auto-starts — eliminating the ~15 s headless zombie and the stolen D-Bus singleton.

Result

With no windowless instance holding the lock, every launch of rakuos-software / rakuos-software-gtk opens a working window — verified, including opening a second window on a subsequent launch. GTK theme/CSS warnings in the logs are cosmetic only.

Proposed follow-up for RakuOS team

The real bug is upstream, in the shipped package, not the user config:

The /etc/xdg/autostart/rakuos-software-tray.desktop Exec=/usr/bin/rakuos-software --tray passes an option the GTK frontend rejects.
The tray daemon's startup behavior of spawning a headless UI child that holds the D-Bus singleton is arguably by design (warm-up) but deadlock-prone: it blocks all later UI launches. Recommend either honoring Activate on the resident, or dropping Exec ... --tray in favor of directly launching the tray binary, or guarding the warm-up so it doesn't own the singleton name.