Proton Mail Bridge worked fine on our Arch Linux KDE Plasma system until a reboot. After login, Bridge ran in the background, but its window and tray icon never appeared. The terminal showed Sentry warnings, while the useful clue was in Bridge’s backend log:
Failed to add test credentials to keychain Object does not exist at path “/org/freedesktop/secrets/collection/login”
Bridge stores credentials through the Linux Secret Service interface, org.freedesktop.secrets. I checked which program owned it:
busctl --user status org.freedesktop.secrets busctl --user tree org.freedesktop.secrets
GNOME Keyring owned the interface, but it exposed only a session collection. The login collection Bridge needed was missing. KDE’s KWallet was running too, but it could not own the same interface at the same time.
The unexpected part was why GNOME Keyring was installed on a Plasma system. My package dependency chain was:
proton-vpn-gtk-app
└── python-proton-keyring-linux
└── gnome-keyring
python-proton-keyring-linux also depends on a Secret Service provider, which KWallet can supply, but the Arch package explicitly depends on gnome-keyring as well. GNOME Keyring’s user socket was enabled globally. After the reboot, its daemon started early and claimed org.freedesktop.secrets, leaving KWallet under KDE’s compatibility service name.
I masked GNOME Keyring’s socket and service for my user account:
systemctl --user mask --now gnome-keyring-daemon.socket gnome-keyring-daemon.service
After logging out of Plasma and back in, Bridge opened normally. Proton VPN continued to work with GNOME Keyring masked.
The mask persists across reboots and does not delete either password store. To check who currently owns Secret Service, run:
busctl --user status org.freedesktop.secrets
To reverse the change:
systemctl --user unmask gnome-keyring-daemon.socket gnome-keyring-daemon.service
If a Linux app reports a missing keyring collection, check both the owner of org.freedesktop.secrets and the package that installed that provider before resetting the app’s data.
and then Add to Home Screen.
