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. It is a very nice GTK4 app. But when I run the Flatpak in Fedora Silverblue, Foliate keeps "losing" its connection to any books I add to it.

If I reboot, the books look like they are still there after I start Foliate, but when I click on them, the reader comes back with "file not found."

So I went into Flatseal, the Flatpak that controls permissions for other Flatpaks. Yes, it's a meta Flatpak (but not a Meta Flatpak). If you run Flatpaks at all, you need it.

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 between boots.

It's weird that before the fix, Foliate could add the books and continue to "see" them until a reboot. But since changing this permission/access in 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 Foliate Flatpak with this bit 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. Just allowing the app to see the actual ebook files is not enough. I could probably figure this out, but I don't have a burning desire (though I could be persuaded) to keep Foliate from seeing all of /home, which is fairly standard for Linux applications. I bet most traditional apps can read/write a lot more than /home.

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 KDE ebook reader Arianna isn't nearly as good as Foliate.

Whether it's functionality, design or familiarity, I tend to like GTK apps more then their KDE equivalents. And as long as that is the case, I might as well be in a GTK-based distro, which for me right now is the atomic/immutable Fedora Silverblue. As I say in my recent post on trying Linux distros, there are some nice little KDE features that don't work in the atomic Fedora Kinoite, along with papercuts I would rather live without. (I'd love for Atomic Plasma to be as good as Atomic GNOME, but it's not there just yet.)

Back to Foliate. I also run it in OpenBSD with Xfce. It works great there as well.