scim: gtk3 apps freezing

gauge-symmetrical · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2017 Posts: 25

Hello everyone,

I run xfce desktop and recently I've run into very weird and big problem. gtk3 apps stop working correctly after some time (usually within 20-30 minutes, sometimes sooner). Seemingly, only these are affected. gtk4 (foliate) and Qt (qt-creator, vlc, audacious and many more) work just fine. For the first time I noticed that firefox may stop working suddenly but I thought it's because of HW accel and some sites probably compromising its stability (discord web client for example). Before there were no problems of this kind at all. These days ff updates pretty freuently, but I believe there were no problems before last update which brought 115.9.1. Now, however, I don't think ff is to blame. Even if I don't start ff in the session, after some time xfce-terminal, evince and other gtk3 apps will stop being responsive. What's interesting, it looks like newly started apps can't show their windows and running apps stop updating their windows. It gives me an impression like there's some global lock fucked up and it simply prevents windows from processing updates (no window can be closed normally, no window can show its contents when unminimized or created anew). What's more, this state seems to persist across X-sessions until reboot. This discovery surprised me a lot. My desktop is managed by lightdm with gtk greeter but still I can't figure out how in the Hell is this even possible. I started to observe this misbehaviour only recently after switching from to be deprecated profile 17.1/desktop to 23.0/split-usr/desktop. I can't insist it started right after switching, because one update took place after that. I have really hard time with this weird issue and have no idea what input might be helpful/useful under these circumstances so needed input will be provided on demand.

Right now I have gtk in two slots

gauge-symmetrical · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2017 Posts: 25

Sadly, not much input seen on this issue

But I started to suspect scim, after I noticed there's no scim icon in notification area. After I have disabled scim loading at X session start, the situation seems to have improved. I rememer, there were already some problems with scim and gtk IMM (IM modules). After the world was rebuilt from scratch during profile upgrade, IMM may have been broken again. Still need some time to investigate.

gauge-symmetrical · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2017 Posts: 25

Well, after having tried to find out the root cause, I have to give up. I don't know who exactly is the culprit here, scim or gtk3. scim was always remarkable because of its fragility, always working on the fringe. gtk3 was always shit, because of its devs. I don't know exactly, how I managed to fix it in the past, I can't seem to figure out how this can be fixed and for me scim is definitely broken beyond repair now.