Menu flickering

[wolfris]

I have just set up my new laptop (HP Pavilion) with Ubuntu 24.04 and ipe 7.2.28 (from repositories). Everything works fine, but for some reason the menus and windows inside ipe are flickering. I have added a screencast for illustration (when black in the video, I see flickering).

All other software work well, this only happens with ipe. I also tried using the flatpack version, and that also works well, no flickering (but it won't find my LaTeX distribution, so it's no use as workaround, but that is a different problem).

Any idea why this could be happening?

Thanks! Screencast from 2024-08-02 11-33-47.webm

[otfried]

What is the output of Help -> Show libraries? Can you compare the output of Ipe from repository with the flatpak one?

Have you tried Ipe 7.2.29 from https://ipe.otfried.org/ -> Download -> Linux binary packages?

It's most likely an issue with the Qt setup. Do you use wayland?

[wolfris]

The libraries from the repository version: Pdftex, Xetex, or Luatex

• Lua 5.4 (769 kB used)
• The font rendering library Freetype 2.13.2 / 2.13.2
• The rendering library Cairo 1.18.0 / 1.18.0
• The clothoid spline library libspiro 1.3
• The GNU scientific library gsl 2.7.1 / 2.7.1
• The GUI toolkit Qt 6.4.2 / 6.4.2
• The compression library zlib 1.3

The libraries from the flatpack version:

• Pdftex, Xetex, or Luatex
  • Lua 5.4 (818 kB used)
  • The font rendering library Freetype 2.13.2 / 2.13.2
  • The rendering library Cairo 1.18.0 / 1.18.0
  • The clothoid spline library libspiro 1.3
  • The GNU scientific library gsl 2.8 / 2.8
  • The GUI toolkit Qt 6.7.1 / 6.7.2
  • The compression library zlib 1.3.1

Looks like the Qt toolkit might be the problem....and yes, my window manager is wayland. I tried version 7.2.29 and it hang at loading existing pdf docs created with ipe.

[otfried]

The flatpak contains a copy of the latest Qt version, so that one does not have the problem. On the other hand, the normal Qt library on 24.04 is apparently Qt 6.4.2, and you say your other software works fine... Have you actually tried some other software that is based on Qt? On a gnome system, most UI software actually uses GTK, not Qt. In fact, on my own Ubuntu-based system, there are very few programs using Qt, and some still use Qt5.

[wolfris]

Thanks for your comment. I've not actually tried Qt based software, so this might well be the reason. Ipe is still completely operational, so not really a problem.

I guess this should then fix itself eventually when Qt is updated, right?

Thanks again.