Duplicate items appear on the dock when launching Flatpak applications

[Zachs-Kappler]

If a Flatpak application is launched from the applications menu or the dock, a second launcher will show up on the dock with a different or lower resolution icon and take ownership of the windows for said application. The first one either disappears after a few seconds. If a Flatpak application was launched from the dock, the same thing happens, but now you have two dock items, one that can control the application's windows and one that can only launch new instances of an application if it allows that.

To reproduce bug:

• Install Firefox, Avidemux, easySSH, or VLC from Flathub through AppCenter.
• After installing, launch one of them from the applications menu.
• Observe the dock's behavior as the application loads, where two dock items appear for the same application, and the better looking one disappears.
• Close the application.
• Go to the applications menu and add the application launcher to the dock.
• Launch the same application from the newly added dock item.
• Observe a second dock item for the launched application appearing and taking ownership of the application's windows.

The expected behavior is when an application is launched, only one dock item should show up with the correct icon and resolution when an application launched from the applications menu. If an application is launched from the dock, it should reuse the launcher item on the dock for window management, not make another one.

Screenshot of the dock-based launcher bug:

[AKDub]

Thought I would update that this is still the case on the Odin early access (please point me in the right direction if I should be pointing this out somewhere else).

This is not the case for all applications though. For example the Telegram Flatpak works as expected, on the other hand the Delta Chat Flatpak generates the second icon - in this case what looks a 'default' or 'empty' grey icon with a gear inside.

[queeup]

Using Odin early access. Thunderbird, OnlyOffice, Gimp flatpaks are also doing it. Probably duplicate issue: #89

[stan-janssen]

This is still a problem. A few months ago, I identified the problem, and patched a few applications upstream (like MPV, GIMP, and offered pull requests to the flathub repo of DAVMail), but I would love to see if we can just fix this is the Dock itself, instead of going around and adding this WMClass parameter to all application's desktop files if only the elementaryOS Dock needs them.

If anyone can point me in the right direction of where this behaviour might be triggered in the Dock source code, I'd be glad to have a look.

[danirabbit]

Thanks for your report! We're doing a complete rewrite of the dock based on our recent UI study and this particular issue isn't able to be reproduced in the new version of the dock