FFS & RTS Not Launching / Staring on Linux

[Stripedtomato]

Hello,

-The Good-
I have used FFS for quite a few years on Linux (locally) with great success, across different distro's (Mint, *buntu, KDE Neon) and newer (Lenovo, HP) systems.

When doing any updates, nuke & paves, or a fresh installs, 100% of the time the FFS installations go as expected.

-The Bad-
3/4 of the time FFS will not launch, but the FFS icon will appear in the task manager / launcher bar for a few seconds as expected, then disappear (the same thing happens with RTS too).

It is obvious by the FFS icon it is trying to launch, but it seems that something is not allowing FFS to launch.

-What I Have Tried-
In the past I have logged out / logged in, did a soft restart, and a hard restart, but none of these made any difference.

I looked at the FFS permissions in /opt and everything is set to root / root. Just for kicks I changed the permissions to "my username" / "my username", but with no luck.

-A Mystery-
About 50% of the time FFS (after a few system restarts and reboots during about 2-3 weeks?) I would try FFS just for the heck of it and FFS seemed to have "magically" fixed itself and would launch as expected.

Hummm.

-I Didn't Dare-
In the past, when FFS would happen to fix itself, I never did any upgrades after that since FFS was working.

My IT gut tells me FFS would have updated itself correctly and would not have caused any launching issues because there was no launching issues at that time, but I didn't want to take a chance, just in case.

-Self Support-
Maybe I did something I didn't realize for FFS to mysteriously fix itself (?). It would be nice to know what I happened to do.

I looked around for a log file, but didn't find one. Strange (?).

I did search the forums here but did not find anything relevant, but is's possible I missed something.

-Currently-
I recently made a donation and installed FFS 11.28 Donation Edition on my i7 10th Gen HP Elitebook 840 with KDE Neon 5.26, as well as onto my 2tb portable SanDisk SSD, but the non-launching issue is still the same in both cases (RTS doesn't launch either).

-Help-
Has anyone had this launching / staring problem FFS before and mybe know of the cause / solution?

-Thank You-
Thanks in advance for any help.

Happy Holidays. :)

[Zenju]

If reproducible, try starting FreeFileSync from the terminal. Chances are good something helpful might get printed there.

[Stripedtomato]

Thanks Zenju for your suggestion, that worked great, and showed the problem. Apparently FFS (and RTS) looks for the following GTK 2 libs and their dependencies upon launching:

libgail-common
libgail18
libgtk2.0-bin
libgtk2.0-common
libgtk2.0-0_2.24.32

Which kind of explains what was happening. I would sometimes do a nuke & pave or fresh install without updating the system because of not having internet access at that time, but I would go ahead and reinstall the applications I could, like FFS, while off-line.

After installing the needed packages, FFS (and RTS) launched and worked as expected.

It would be nice it FFS was also available as an AppImage or SNAP (gasp?) so it could be installed off-line and updated if the user wanted, when the system was back on-line again.

[Zenju]

Next time this happens, please post the exact error message you're seeing in the terminal. The FreeFileSync launcher could parse this and give a more helpful error message instead, including some advice what to do.