Use Password Managers with Web Browsers

KDE Linux ships web browsers as Flatpak packages, which prevents 3rd-party password managers such as 1Password and KeePassXC from communicating with their browser extensions until they implement support for the “Flatpak XDG Native Messaging Proxy“ protocol. To date, neither has done so.

No simple solution currently exists to remedy this issue on KDE Linux. General users are recommended to choose a different method of managing passwords.

Options presented here are suitable only for advanced users comfortable with tinkering and recovering from breakage.

1Password

1Password may be made able to communicate with its browser extension by installing it using Nix, Distrobox, or manually using this script.

KeePassXC

Various options for making KeePassXC able to communicate with its browser extension can be found at the following websites:

• https://www.snamellit.com/blog/keepassxc-and-flatpak
• https://discourse.flathub.org/t/how-to-run-firefox-and-keepassxc-in-a-flatpak-and-get-the-keepassxc-browser-add-on-to-work/437

Help improve the situation

Please consider providing feedback to password manager developers and browser vendors asking them to improve support for immutable operating systems and native messaging between Flatpak-sandboxed apps, and Flatpak support in general.

See also:

• https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/flatpak/2025-April/002386.html
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1955255
• https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/12327

Article contributed by Nate Graham, and Rudolf Psenicnik under the CC-BY-4.0 license.