Wayland: does not show window without a patch on newer electron versions

[selfisekai]

just a heads-up for you. I'm the maintainer of the signal-desktop package in alpine linux.

coincidentally 2 things happened at once, so I'm not sure which one was the problem, but I'm guessing the former:

• upgrade of electron to 24
• upgrade of signal-desktop to 6.13.0 (well, an attempt)

with both these changes, the window of signal-desktop stopped appearing for me.

it shows correctly with this patch:

--- ./app/main.ts.orig
+++ ./app/main.ts
@@ -721,7 +721,7 @@
   const titleBarOverlay = await getTitleBarOverlay();
 
   const windowOptions: Electron.BrowserWindowConstructorOptions = {
-    show: false,
+    show: true,
     width: DEFAULT_WIDTH,
     height: DEFAULT_HEIGHT,
     minWidth: MIN_WIDTH,

log: https://s3.sakamoto.pl/lnl-shit/Ad6QacHk03dQ.txt

[indutny-signal]

Hello!

Thanks for the heads up.

The show: false is intentional, and we show the window when ready-to-show event happen. It sounds like it doesn't happen for you, which is concerning. However, I'm unable to reproduce it locally in either Ubuntu VM or on macOS. Can you reproduce it on either of officially supported platforms?

[selfisekai]

the problem seems to be that the ready-to-show event does not ever happen

pretty sure this only happens on electron 24 (and not on 23), while you still officially ship with electron 22, so I guess not

[indutny-signal]

Unfortunately I can't reproduce it locally. Are you trying it with a packaged app, or with yarn start?

[nekopsykose]

Unfortunately I can't reproduce it locally.

to be more exact, are you sure you're using electron24, and then also perhaps on wayland (--ozone-platform-hint=wayland, not sure if it's relevant)

if not, then it's not reproducible, as this was not a bug with 23.

[indutny-signal]

Yup, I'm on 24.1.0, but testing on macOS and Ubuntu VM in github actions. I have a feeling that actions VM is not using wayland because we don't pass this argument. Can you reproduce this issue with just electron fiddle alone? Might be worth reporting to Electron!

[nekopsykose]

yeah, sounds more related to electron in this environment then, unless there is a very good other reason the ready-to-show event is never emitted.

thanks for checking!

[brjsp]

@selfisekai Did you get Signal to work with electron 23? I recall it showing an error box on startup when i tried and that's why i delayed 23 in openSUSE.

[selfisekai]

@brjsp we did not try

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

We'll be releasing a beta version based on Electron 24 soon; we'll see if that works for you.

[roubert]

Newly released 6.19.0 (which uses Electron 24.3.0) doesn't work with Wayland for me (Debian bookworm amd64), even though running signal-desktop with --ozone-platform-hint=auto --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations worked fine until 6.18.1 (which used Electron 22.3.5), but now no window ever opens, just as described in this issue.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@roubert Can you tell us more about your configuration? A debug log would help as well!

[roubert]

I have a fairly standard Debian bookworm amd64 installation, using the default GNOME desktop enviroment on Wayland, with the only obvious non-standard thing being this additional --ozone-platform-hint=auto --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations passed to signal-desktop.

As the GUI never opens, I can't use the Debug Log / Submit feature, but I've now sent my logs per mail to support@signal.org as described here:

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318591-Debug-Logs-and-Crash-Reports

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

You can get a debug log straight from disk at ~/.config/Signal/logs