How to get the Foliate ebook reader Flatpak to work

4 July, 2025 - Categories: Linux - Tags: ebooks, Foliate, Flatpak

By Steven Rosenberg

I've been having a problem with the Foliate ebook reader — which is a very nice GTK4 app. I run the Flatpak in Fedora Silverblue, and it keeps "losing" its connection to any books I add to it.

If I reboot, the books look like they are still there, but I click on them, and Foliate reports "file not found."

So I went into Flatseal, the Flatpak that controls permissions for other Flatpaks. If you run Flatpaks at all, you need this.

In Flatseal, I went to Foliate and hit the switch that allows it to see the home directory.

That did it. The fix couldn't have been easier. Now Foliate doesn't "forget" where the ebooks are.

It's weird that Foliate can add the books and "see" them until a reboot, but since this Flatseal fix makes the problem go away, I don't have to think about it any more — beyond filing a bug or issue upstream asking them to ship the Flatpak with this permission added.

I initially thought I could use Flatseal to just let Foliate see the directories where I have ebooks, but that isn't enough. There must be some config in /home that it needs to see, and just allowing the app to see the actual ebook files is not enough. Letting an app see all of /home is fairly normal for Linux.

On my way to this solution, I tried the Foliate Flatpak from the Flathub and Fedora repos, and the problem existed in both.

Especially with this fix, I recommend Foliate. The app works very well and looks great. One of the things that made my stay in Plasma-based Fedora Kinoite short was that the Plasma ebook reader (can't remember the name) wasn't nearly as good as Foliate, and if I'm going to run more GTK apps than not, I might as well be in a GTK-based distro, which for me right now is Fedora Silverblue.

I also run Foliate in OpenBSD with Xfce. It runs great there as well.