Try launching any of those apps from Terminal and see if you get any errors in the terminal.
Check if you are logged in on Wayland instead of Xorg.
In terminal, enter
uname -a
and paste the output here.
In terminal, run
snap list
to check if any affected apps are snaps.
I logged again in xorg and those that stopped working started working again. even viber that didn’t work at all did so. and now logged in wayland again but nothing happens. tried synaptic from the terminal, it opens but it says “Starting synaptic without administrative privileges”. firewall (gufw) gives some error like this “(gufw.py:4510): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 23:17:35.198: _gtk_replace_virtual_modifiers: assertion ‘GDK_IS_KEYMAP (keymap)’ failed”.
as for viber, it is a flatpack and it says command flatpak unknown!!!
Ah yes… were we talking about Wayland not long ago?
yeah, I know… but… but… how can I check what version of wayland is being used in zorin?
I think that
xdpyinfo
should list that near the top if run while logged into Wayland
Uh… I was wrong. And embarrassingly so. XDPY… what was I thinking…?
Oh well…
don’t know how to read it
it’s annoying and I don’t want to login with xorg because the gestures will not work and I have to install libinput and a gui and configure them all over again. not much job but annoying
That lists the mutter compositor version as 3.30 and 3.28 which is the same as gnome / gnome shell and consistent with Ubuntu 18.04.
I am sad to say you have a catch-22 tradeoff here.
I think the logical step is to switch over to trying to get gestures to consistently work using xorg.
As annoying as it may be…:
Can you explain this catch-22 tradeoff please
If you stick to Wayland to keep gestures, then you lose apps that will not launch.
If you stick to xorg to keep apps launching properly, then you lose gestures.
I think that your best bet is to stick with xorg and enable gestures in it.
Yeah, it seems so. Or for casual use i stick with Wayland, and same time test its bugs and for “power” use i switch to xorg
found out that wayland doesn’t like running GUI apps as other user, in this case as root or whatever. but then I wonder why some apps that don’t require admin privileges don’t work either! strange world it is 
Wayland is So Not Ready…
one thing. where are the user groups in zorin? how do I add the user in the input group to enable gestures in xorg?
thanks a lot
Sorry if I seemed short- I was surrounded by Zombies when the alert with your question popped up.
short is sometimes better I am trying this one https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg
seems a bit easier to configure, even better than libinput gestures with GUI
