I recently blogged about some problems with UI tests in GNOME due to xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.

Unfortunately, I also started to experience problems similar to those with KDE Plasma 6.1 (Linux EndeavourOS and Arch); as in the other blog post, the problem is only with Wayland.

I’ll use this example project (taken from my TDD book): https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/demo-attsw. It is a simple Java Swing application where UI tests are written with AssertJ Swing. I run “mvn verify,” and most of the UI tests fail (when the AssertJ Swing bot tries to interact with the application window, it mostly gets the position wrong). This is the leading cause of the failure: I get this dialog popping up from KDE, “Remote control requested”, coming from “xdg-desktop-portal-kde“:

This shows up as soon as one of the UI tests starts.

First, I must click “Share” (of course, tests have already failed). Note that the dialog remembers the setting for the application you used to run the tests. For example, if you change the Java version to run the tests, you’ll get the dialog popping up again.

Starting the UI tests again still leads to failures. I have to change these system settings:

Now, UI tests finally succeed. Though, they tend to be quite flaky. I see that while they run, since they interact with the keyboard and mouse, other windows get focused, and some interactions are performed on the other windows, not one of the applications under test. Things improve if you only leave the application under test on the screen. It is even better to place the mouse in the part of the screen where the application under test usually appears.

In general, with such kinds of UI tests, it might be better to switch to X11… 🙁