Electron Apps Blank on openSUSE Tumbleweed

One of the joys of rolling distributions is that every once in a while, you get a weird issue that pops up. I recognize that this is a possibility and a rare one that the fantastic openSUSE community does end up fixing. I figure, if I have to find the solution, than I may as well share that with references and what I am doing about it.

First off, i have submitted a but report so that I am not just complaining.

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1216242

When I launch some Electron based applications, specifically Signal and Bitwarden, I get a blank screen. It shows nothing but the menu above

Doing some digging, saw that they were both Electron apps and something was failing within them. Searching based on that this was openSUSE Tumbleweed and these were Electron apps, I stumbled upon this Reddit post:

latest tumbleweed updates causing blank screen in all electron apps
byu/black_loop inopenSUSE

Which means I was not the first to experience this problem.

One solution presented in the comments was to remove the GPUCashe folder in the troubled applications. For example, with signal, to remove:

~/.config/Signal/GPUCache

This worked for Signal but not for Bitwarden. What worked for Bitwarden was to run it with the option “–disable-gpu”

bitwarden --disable-gpu

That will allow me to use Bitwarden, without issue once again. So, for the time being, I will run Bitwarden as such… because I rely heavily on the application.

This little modification in the application properties will make launching it from the menu one would expect.

Final Thoughts

Things happen. Software that is constantly moving will sometimes have an issue. These are pretty rare in Tumbleweed and I am sure it will be fixed shortly. Until that time, this will hopefully help those that are affected.

References

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1216242
Bitwarden a Secure Password Manager on openSUSE
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/1766gop/latest_tumbleweed_updates_causing_blank_screen_in/