Hi all. Been using Zorin for about a week and have noticed a few strange things. I have Discord and Steam downloaded and working though 2 problems came up.
Steam: When going into settings and changing the library location, I cant seem to access my 2 mechanical drives, only the m.2 zorin is installed on.
Discord: Discord does not give notification sounds and when trying to drag and drop an image from my mechanical drive into discord it gives me an error.
I am assuming this is a problem with discord and steam not being able to access my drives, though the no sound from discord makes me think that both of these problems are issues with permissions.
Have any of you run across this? I dont know a lot about permissions but I know that each user has their own set of permissions. should I add discord and steam to my usergroup? Or would it be better to give them both access to sound and my external drives?
You can use the Settings > Extensions or Gnome Tweak Tool (sudo apt install gnome-tweaks) to disable each of the above - then enable each of the above to "jostle" them. Reboot and test notification sounds.
Could this be because of the package format, it seems that both Steam and Discord are offered by default as Flatpak and Snap, respectively, through the software store...
I think I'm starting to suffer from the "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" because lately this is the only advice I give to every problem
Download them as .deb files, not flatpak or snaps. They give more headache than easy to use.
You should find a .deb on both apps homepages as I recall it.
A common rule I use is only use flatpak as last resort. Snaps I won't touch if I got pay for it.
In the Store there should be several option of the same app. You need to inspect them to see what package they come as. In latest version of the software center, you can click in the upper corner of the software center to choose package. It should be available for Zorin 17 when it comes out.
I agree with Storm, I would personally try and install them as .deb packages and use Flatpak as a last resort. When you go to the software store you can check the source of the install on the top right corner, there should be a dropdown menu like this, where ZorinOS indicates the native package format for the OS which in this case is .deb:
Sometimes, there won't be dropdown menu which means there's only one source available, as it is the case with Discord. In those cases, scroll all the way down the description and look for the source to verify if it's a native package, snap or flatpak.
Luckily, both Steam and Discord have .deb packages available to download on their respective websites so I'd encourage you to use those instead.
