darktable on Wayland: current status, major issue in GNOME (with XWayland), minor issue in all desktops (with XWayland), and workarounds

Software darktable
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Thanks again, everyone, for feedback! It helped to narrow down where this is happening and why.

I’ve updated the title to make it clear that the major issue is in GNOME (not KDE), and that minor issues hit both (at least using XWayland instead of native Wayland).

It’s still unclear if it’s showing up on Wayland anywhere other than GNOME, but it looks like it might be a regression in Mutter in GNOME 49… And GNOME 49 (which only has a Wayland session, not Xorg session support) is already shipping in Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu 25.10. It’s on the way for Fedora 43 as well.

I’ve found a few upstream issues filed with Mutter and mentioned them on the darktable XWayland freeze issue @ Darktable freeze on wayland · Issue #19441 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub

Quick list here (more details when listed on the issue):

And there’s an issue (already mentioned above) that looks similar filed against GTK, although this looks like a possible Mutter issue instead:

I’ve also filed the submenu disappearing issue when running darktable in native Wayland mode @ Wayland: Attempting to open a submenu closes the menu · Issue #19511 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub

Thanks again, everyone here. And especially huge thanks to the darktable devs for your continued work on an awesome project!

Hopefully knowing what’s happening on what kind of systems helps narrow down the issues further.

I’ve followed up with the GNOME issues, to let them know that darktable is also affected, and that the various issues also exist, with a few cross-links. With this extra information, perhaps it’ll help point to the issue and a fix sooner.

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Did you start an issue on the mutter repo that is specific to your issue (two monitors)? These long post with extra information are not helpful in my opinion. A specific bug report would at least point a developer in the right direction.

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Confirm that I see the freeze issue on my Intel laptop with fedora 43 beta when using an external monitor but it doesn’t seem to always happen.

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@GMan: I disagree with your “opinion” that this thread was “not helpful”.

As a community, we’ve narrowed down the scope of the main issue, confirmed multiple other issues, and updated several related issues.

The main showstopper bug: I found that there’s already an issue that covers our exact case @

In that issue, they have two monitors, using apps in XWayland, and see a freeze. Except it’s for Thunderbird and RawTherapee specifically, showing that it’s a problem in the stack (somewhere in Mutter 49), not the apps. I commented that we’re seeing this with darktable too and linked it. And I linked what looked like related Mutter issues to that one as well.

This thread was already useful in other ways too and moved multiple issue tickets forward:

  1. More people are informed that there are multiple Wayland issues (mainly XWayland-related, with 1 critical one affecting GNOME currently, whereas native Wayland has 1 apparent issue)
  2. People have confirmed that they’re seeing or not seeing the critical darktable freezing issue, based on their hardware, desktop environment, and version. It was important in figuring out the exact scope, as this issue only shows up on actual hardware, not in VMs (due to being triggered by more than 1 monitor). And it doesn’t show up in logs either, so “crowdsourcing” it to see where it happens made sense.
  3. I’ve found this issue already reported, so I mentioned that this is more widespread and affects other apps, like darktable. And I linked related issues together.
  4. Others here confirmed that they saw the native Wayland issue of menus disappearing. I reported that darktable issue.
  5. We had confirmation about the drag and drop bug in Wayland as well, seeing that it only shows up in XWayland, not Wayland native, and that it affects more than just KDE and Dolphin, but also shows up in GNOME with Nautilus.

I already did what you suggested (before you suggested it), and even communicated that here before you posted, directly above your own post. I did find the exact bug that already existed and added more info to it, saying that darktable is impacted as well (and linked to the darktable issue).

(In the future, please read comments you’re responding to before forming and posting “opinions” about them. Thanks.)

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Facts:

  1. You did not start a new issue in mutter repo.
  2. The issue you linked reads different than the one you reported here (eg. I don’t see anything about only being a problem with two monitors).

Opinion:

  1. I should not post/reply anymore to this thread. Good luck in your crusade.
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Hey guys, how about taking a breath :smile: Have a nice day :wave:

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Staying cool is mostly a good thing :slight_smile:

Not wanting to heat a fire but i read through this posts again and couldn’t spot anything that’s to be handled inside the dt code base the dt devs are not fully aware of.
It might also help to have a look into dt github btw, there is ongoing massive work in the darktable gtk code base btw …
Also the “mutter folks” constantly do a good job …

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FWIW I upgraded one of my workstations to Fedora 43. Gnome and many other components were updated to newer versions. I still was able to reproduce Darktable freezes on Gnome with Wayland if 2 monitors are connected. A workaround is to use XFCE with X11 if I want to run DT.

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You can use Fedora 43 KDE on Wayland too. It should work (works on F42 KDE).

edit: while the title of the thread blames Wayland, the problem is really Mutter.

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Thanks, I used to run KDE in its version 3 glory. But now I find it too complicated and visually not that appealing. Minimalist Gnome with just 3 extensions looks good and works well enough for me. And when it does not work then there is an ugly but functional XFCE.

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the new kde is very clean

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Thanks, I know, I tried modern KDE a few times. Don’t fancy their font rendering and overall overengineering. I strongly prefer simple things without unnecessary fluff.

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Well, I wish I would have found this thread before I upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10. I’m getting this problem with all the builds of darktable 5.2.1 that I’ve tried. Setting GDK_BACKEND=wayland doesn’t seem to help me too much (it’s responsive for a little while then it stops working). I guess I’ll need to try using something other than Gnome?

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there are wayland fixes in 5.4, due out in a few days.

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Good to know. On the plus side, I can confirm that switching to KDE appears to work. I guess this is as good an excuse as any to give it a try.

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Wayland is not really the problem. It the compositor/window manager. Gnome uses Mutter and KDE uses kwin. I had zero problems with KDE Wayland and dt 5.4 will have some fixes when using two monitors and Mutter.

1 Like