Desktop app is blurry

[lucalewin]

Version

(where do I find this? its the newest version from Flathub)

Operating System

Linux

Distribution Method

Flatpak (Linux)

Describe the issue

In the screenshot below, the app is very blurry. This does not affect the menu bar and the title bar. This is also only the case for GitButler, no other app has this.

The blur makes it difficult for me to use it unfortunately.

How to reproduce (Optional)

No response

Expected behavior (Optional)

No blur

Relevant log output (Optional)

[Byron]

Thanks a lot for reporting!

This seems to be some issue with HiDPI not being supported, interesting.
CC @slarse

[lucalewin]

I use a normal 1920x1080 monitor. I know that about four weeks ago, this was not an issue

[slarse]

Hi @lucalewin,

You can see the version under the "Help" menu, but we can also see on Flathub that the version is 0.18.0, which is old. That Flatpak is community maintained (see LINUX.md for what's what), and we just don't have the bandwidth to try to debug issues with it. You'd have to reach out to the maintainers of that Flatpak.

What distribution are you on? Can you try installing one of our first-party packages, i.e. the deb or rpm packages that can be found on our downloads page?

[lucalewin]

I just reinstalled it using the newest rpm package (0.19.6) and it still seems the same to me. I am not sure if you can see this too on the screenshot.

The code preview/diff is especially bad I think.

I a also a little confused, because probably nothing changed with the installation since the 0.18 install, but in the beginning I never experienced this. I though it was an update but apparently it was not. idk

[slarse]

I a also a little confused, because probably nothing changed with the installation since the 0.18 install, but in the beginning I never experienced this. I though it was an update but apparently it was not. idk

Okay, but that's at least something, we can conclude that nothing changed with GitButler to cause this behavior. Something else has changed. This is most likely related WebKitGTK or your graphics stack, as that takes care of the rendering.

Usually when there's a problem with rendering, NVIDIA is involved. Are you running a NVIDIA card by any chance? If you are, could you:

• Try running without hardware acceleration by setting the env variable WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1
• If the above works, what driver version are you on? Also see if you can correlate an upgrade of those drivers to the blurry font.

[lucalewin]

Yes, NVIDIA as always...

running WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 but launches GitButler without the blur.

To automatically set it at startup, I changed the GitButler.desktop to this

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Development;
Exec=env WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 gitbutler-tauri
StartupWMClass=gitbutler-tauri
Icon=gitbutler-tauri
Name=GitButler
Terminal=false
Type=Application
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/but

Thanks for the help

[slarse]

@lucalewin Ah, that's great progress! Thanks for the suggestion on editing the desktop entry, that's a pretty nice way to incorporate it.

If you feel so inclined, there are some more things to check. Disabling hardware acceleration outright will work here as it completely offloads the rendering from the NVIDIA card, but it will almost certainly make the app less snappy. The following may yield better results:

• Blurry fonts on NVIDIA cards has been known to be caused by anti-aliasing going wild (see for example this ancient post on the subject, or this more recent SO post). It could be worthwhile to check if you have some kind of AA enabled, notably FXAA according to those posts.
• If that doesn't work, you could try setting __NV_DISABLE_EXPLICIT_SYNC=1. I really don't think that should affect text clarity, but I personally have that set to prevent some crashes in WebKitGTK, and I don't have issues with blurry text. So, perhaps worth testing.