Darktable 5.3 (development) user interface very slow

Hello,

So I just compiled Darktable from git (release-5.3.0-925-gfb190b005b) on my Debian stable system following the usual procedure that is described in the README.

It works, including OpenCL. However I noticed that the GUI has become very slow in some cases. It is so slow that when moving the mouse over thumbnails in the lighttable view, there’s a very noticeable delay before a thumbnail becomes highlighted.

Again, in the lighttable view, if I collapse all the modules on the right, I can adjust the width of the right pane smoothly. But as soon as the “export” module is un-collapsed, adjusting the width of the right pane becomes very jerky affair, the refresh rate goes down to a couple fps at most.

The same occurs in other modules, also in the darktable. Opening some modules (especially ones that have sliders) is not smooth anymore.

I do not recall seeing this problem when I compiled 5.3 in September. But searching the web did not reveal any discussion of the problem.

Before I try to bisect this - has anyone experienced something similar?

I am on Windows and the interface is fine. No comment about linux builds.

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Not observed on macOS either.

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No issue on Linux Mint either.

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I ran git bisect. The commit that introduces the jerkyness on my machine is

commit 66f2b4bd0256d47d0b2f41f85cb0883fcd01fc88 (HEAD)
Author: Diederik ter Rahe <dterrahe@yahoo.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 15 08:38:44 2025 +0200

    bauhaus clean up convoluted width calcs

    show hovered value in tooltip

The parent commit

commit da6625437dc485725097eec39e95b9998f742029
Author: Diederik ter Rahe <dterrahe@yahoo.com>
Date:   Sat Oct 11 19:42:10 2025 +0200

    clean up bauhaus header file; make _DtBauhausWidget private

does not show the problem.

The difference in UI responsibility is very clearly noticeable. I verified with clean builds and freshly copied identical configuration directories.

I did not have the time yet to look at the code (also, I have no experience with Gtk). But the commit in question touches UI code. I will open an issue on github.

Please include your gtk version in your GitHub issue.

Could not reproduce on Fedora 42, DT is built from latest sources.