Signal-desktop: signal-desktop freezes on notification under i3/sway on Arch GNU/Linux

Created on 25 Jul 2018 · 8Comments · Source: signalapp/Signal-Desktop

Environment:

Arch GNU/Linux
wayland/xorg
i3/sway

Had this issue for some time, so was just avoiding running it from my desktop, only from the phone that was painful since I am not a "I use my phone for everything" person.
I was able to fix it by installing a notification daemon.
in my case I installed https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dunst
this solved my issue.

Bug Upstream Change Needed

Source

r3k2

👍1

All 8 comments

What happens if you turn off notifications in settings?

scottnonnenberg-signal on 25 Jul 2018

@scottnonnenberg-signal thats the first thing that came to my mind of course, but for some reason, I was trying ctrl+f to get the menu and disable it and did not work, maybe cause of the window manager sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway because is key binds heavy. I am almost sure I try ctrl+f also on i3 but also keybind heavy.

r3k2 on 25 Jul 2018

I can confirm this. I'm trying to use signal-desktop 1.20.0 under NixOS and XMonad. Signal starts, but if I scan the QR code or access any of the menus, it freezes almost instantly.

juselius on 24 Jan 2019

Maybe try starting it with a --disable-gpu argument? I suspect that we're dealing with hardware acceleration driver problems.

scottnonnenberg-signal on 24 Jan 2019

Bingo! Works! Thank you.

juselius on 24 Jan 2019

I had the same issue but on Debian.
Distro: Debian 10 Buster
Kernel: 5.5.11-custom
Window Manager: sway, wayland

The issue went away by disabling notifications, but having signal freeze for 30 seconds every time I got a message made it unusable. Glad I finally found this thread a month later.

Posting to let people know this is still an issue.

NickEckardt on 22 Apr 2020

👍1

Joplin and ElectronMail Electron-based apps experience freezing issue if a Linux kernel 5.5+ is used, no issues using kernel 5.4 (probably older versions would work too). So using kernel 5.4 is the only revealed reliable workaround for now.

vladimiry on 23 Apr 2020

Experienced this on Arch Linux with XFCE. The Signal window bar would flash when there was a notification, but the electron app window would be completely unresponsive until I closed and reopened it. Disabling notifications fixed it.