login hangs when connecting to Debian 10 host with no cockpit installed

I wanted to try out the new 'connect to host with no cockpit installed' feature of cockpit client (flatpak stable version 295), but whenever I try that on one of my hosts (this is a debian 10 host), I get to see the following error:
```
cockpit.packages - could not detect libexecdir
```

Now this error doesn't say very much and I'd like to give you more details, but I couldn't find any debug/verbosity flags to pass to the cockpit client. Let me know if I can provide you any additional information!