Linux Mint 21.1 VIctoria. Downloading flatpaks give me the error "opendir(refs/remotes): No such file or directory"

[ngalerchalegocity60330]

What the title says. Using the software manager to download flatpak apps gives me the error message, "opendir(refs/remotes): No such file or directory", however downloading other types of apps like "system packages" runs fine

[mtwebster]

Have you tried building flatpaks or adding/modifying remotes? Did it ever work? This is a broken installation but not typically something that would just 'happen'.

You can try re-adding flathub:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

or trying to repair the installation:

flatpak repair

[ngalerchalegocity60330]

Didn't use your workaround as it downloading flatpaks in general works now after restarting Linux Mint and not using it for a while. Very odd that the software manager gives that error. Thanks for the tip nevertheless.

[RundownRhino]

Experienced a similar issue on Mint 21.2 (after updating inplace from 20) - any flatpak commands failed with an error along the lines of "opendir(~/.local/share/flatpak/objects): No such file or directory". This also prevented me from launching any flatpak executables installed by mintinstall in any way. The commands from the comment above didn't help.

The directory in question, ~/.local/share/flatpak, had very boring contents:

❯ tree -ah
[4.0K]  .
├── [   0]  .changed
└── [4.0K]  repo
    └── [  68]  config

1 directory, 2 files

, notably not including objects.
I ended up just deleting this directory. After that, the next usage of flatpak generated a new one with saner contents:

❯ tree -ah
[4.0K]  .
├── [   0]  .changed
└── [4.0K]  repo
    ├── [  68]  config
    ├── [4.0K]  extensions
    ├── [4.0K]  objects
    ├── [4.0K]  refs
    │   ├── [4.0K]  heads
    │   ├── [4.0K]  mirrors
    │   └── [4.0K]  remotes
    ├── [4.0K]  state
    └── [4.0K]  tmp
        └── [4.0K]  cache

10 directories, 2 files

and everything started working. Not sure what causes this issue.