← Otto User GuidePrivacy
What apps have been allowed to do, where to take an answer back, and when Otto asks for your password.
Settings › Privacy
Screen sharing lists:
- Remembered screen shares. An app that shared your screen and was remembered can share again without the picker. Each row says what it shares (“Records the screen eDP-1”, “Records a window”). Forget removes it, and the app has to ask again next time.
- Remote desktop shares that were remembered, the same way.
- Screenshots. Apps that asked to take screenshots without the screenshot dialog, each set to Ask, Allow or Don’t Allow. Forget puts it back to asking.
Notifications lists the apps that sent a notification through the notification portal (Flatpak apps), each with a switch. Turning one off stops its notifications. Forget drops your answer, so the app is asked again the next time it notifies.
The page reads xdg-permission-store, where xdg-desktop-portal keeps these
answers, and updates as soon as an answer changes anywhere: in the share
picker, in another desktop’s settings, or with flatpak permission-reset.
Apps outside a sandbox can’t be told apart by the portal, so they share one
row, labelled Apps outside a sandbox.
Remembering a screen share
The screen-sharing picker has a Remember for
The checkbox appears only for apps the portal can name: Flatpak apps, and apps that bring their own app id. Apps started outside a sandbox all look the same to the portal, and remembering for one would remember for all of them, so they are always asked.
The password panel
Otto shows the same frosted card as the lock screen whenever something needs your password:
- a program you run with
pkexec, or a system service asking polkit (adding a printer, installing an update); - a change to a setting that decides what runs in front of your password or whether the screen locks: the locker, the login screen program, auto-lock, locking on suspend, the lid and the power button.
The card says who is asking and what for. Type your password and press Enter, or touch the fingerprint reader if your PAM setup uses one. Cancel or Escape says no. While the card is up nothing else can take the keyboard or be drawn over it.
Otto is the session’s polkit agent unless you turn it off:
# ~/.config/otto/config.toml
polkit_agent = false
Do that only if you start another polkit agent yourself; without one,
pkexec can’t ask for a password.
Checking for new versions
The top bar asks otto-version.otto-desktop.workers.dev whether a newer Otto
has been released, a minute after it starts and every six hours after. Each
request carries the version you are running.
Once a week the request also says “count me”, with how long Otto has been installed: its first week, first month, first six months, or longer. The server adds one to that week’s total for your version and age, which is how the number of people using Otto is known. It keeps those weekly totals and nothing else. This works the same way as Fedora’s countme.
On your machine, ~/.local/state/otto/update-check holds the date Otto was
first seen and the week it last counted itself.
To turn the check off, and with it the count:
# ~/.config/otto/otto-bar.toml, or /etc/otto/otto-bar.toml for every user
update_check_url = ""
What this doesn’t cover
These answers keep sandboxed apps in check. A program running as you, outside a sandbox, can edit your configuration and the permission store directly; Otto doesn’t pretend to stop that.