Bug report: flatpak Zotero not picking up gnome-keyring

bakhsv · September 10, 2026

Reprot id is 1785837957.

I am running zotero installed via flatpak on debian forky. I have gnome-keyring installed system-wide via apt, version 50.0, but after recent update zotero prompts me with the following message:

Zotero couldn’t access your Linux keyring to encrypt your stored credentials. Your credentials remain stored unencrypted on disk. Make sure a keyring service such as GNOME Keyring or KWallet is installed and running, and restart Zotero.

aborel · September 10, 2026

Only the tarball and (to some extent) deb Linux packages are officially supported by the Zotero team. https://www.zotero.org/support/installation#other_packages

You should report the problem to the flatpak package maintainers.

bakhsv · September 10, 2026

Ah, for some reason I though the flatpak was official. I see, thanks.

colinkuef · 2026-09-13T13:47:50+00:00

I had this problem on tarball also

dstillman · 2026-09-13T13:48:44+00:00

@colinkuef: You'd have to say more about what exactly you've tried. But the error means Zotero can't access the system keyring.

Note that in Zotero 10.0.2 you can choose to bypass the keyring and continue to store credentials unencrypted.

hpfr · 2026-10-11T20:02:47+00:00

You may need to expose the secret service on the session bus to the sandboxed Zotero.

flatpak override --user --talk-name org.freedesktop.secrets org.zotero.Zotero

The Flathub maintainers should probably add this to the manifest. [edit: https://github.com/flathub/org.zotero.Zotero/pull/337 ]

There is a relatively new desktop portal that can be considered by Zotero developers in future: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Secret.html

The portal ensures Zotero can’t access all other applications’ secrets, a shortcoming of the original secret service design.