Arch Linux

ipyakuza

Member

Registered: 2013-06-24

Posts: 50

[SOLVED] Discord / Slack / Signal Desktop frozen windows?

I've been fighting this issue for about a year now.  In a nutshell, latest Arch updates applied with i3-gaps but certain applications (mainly Discord, Slack, and Signal Desktop) have this weird refresh or botched video caching issue.  The applications launch and works fine BUT anytime someone comments or replies (content changes on the screen) in any of the apps,  that apps window seems to hang or freeze for around 30-60 seconds.  If I change screens and come back i can see visual artifacts from the other screen in place of the Discord|Slack|Signal windows.

VIDEO HW:
* NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
* nvidia video driver
* Latest updates

When I run nvidia-smi I can see Discord and slack but not Signal Desktop:
0   N/A  N/A            2213      G   /opt/discord/Discord                     49MiB |
0   N/A  N/A           44503      G   /usr/lib/slack/slack                     78MiB |
I was curious if this was a video acceleration related issue.

I've tried looking around for what commonalities are out there would could cause this and many references seem to point to electron framework.  Once the 30+ seconds goes by the application refreshes and resumes like normal, i can continue using it just fine until the next update (someone sends a reply back to me) then it freezes again for 30+ seconds.

These are all the electron packages I have installed:
electron 1:36-1
electron13 13.6.9-3
electron14 14.2.9-2
electron15 15.5.4-1
electron16 16.2.8-1
electron17 17.4.11-6
electron18 18.3.15-4
electron19 19.1.9-5
electron21 21.4.4-1
electron24 24.8.8-1
electron25 25.9.3-1
electron27 27.3.11-10
electron31 31.7.7-4
electron32 32.3.3-1
electron33 33.4.11-2
electron34 34.5.4-1
electron35 35.2.2-1
electron36 36.1.0-1

I recently had to remove v28-v30 due to the UTF-8 changes and incompatibility back in Feb 2025.  I also have libnotify package installed, I read a thread about these timeouts possibly because there wasnt a notification service (popup) from the taskbar/systray) but it is installed.

Any insights on where I can look would be great.

Last edited by ipyakuza (2025-05-06 18:35:47)

ipyakuza

Member

Registered: 2013-06-24

Posts: 50

Re: [SOLVED] Discord / Slack / Signal Desktop frozen windows?

I found another thread regarding Discord here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discor … r_messaged

This looks like a possible notification service issue.  Even though I have libnotify installed, looks like i3 doesn't have it's own implimentation of a notification service (like gnome/KDE, etc).  I am giving dunst a try...

ipyakuza

Member

Registered: 2013-06-24

Posts: 50

Re: [SOLVED] Discord / Slack / Signal Desktop frozen windows?

Looks like this was the problem.  I just needed to add dunst and launch it as part of my i3 config: exec --no-startup-id dunst.  I tested manually launching it from the CLI and notification popups started working.  Ran some dialogue tests with friends in the apps and no more freezing.  So to anyone experiencing these weird app hangs/freezes you may need to look into your notification services to ensure they are running.  Looks like a lot of larger WM have them already (gnome/kde/xfce/etc) but lightweight ones may not.  There are apparently several notification services out there, dunst was just a lightweight one.  Hope this helps someone else.

sabana

Member

Registered: 2025-04-26

Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED] Discord / Slack / Signal Desktop frozen windows?

Thank you, this helped me