OK, as this is related to running in non-local sessions, I'm not sure
how common this use case is.
It also appears that the issue happens on other non-debian distros (eg Fedora
here https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3001 ) and that upstream state
that "When running via ssh, you are missi
Ok so the issue is actually one with Polkit not having policy set for non-local
sessions, which this particular situation was. I was connecting from NoMachine
(kind of like VNC) which uses ssh for authentication, so polkit was treating
the same as trying to run flatpak from ssh. My "solution" wa
