Popup windows sometimes appear as black squares

• Dec 16, 2021 - 20:17

Popup windows, such as, instruments, printing, etc. appear as black boxes sometimes.

The way to reproduce this issue is to open the printing/instruments/page settings or any other popup menus. If it doesn't appear as a black square immediately, open it several times in a row and fairly often (about 3 times out of 10) the issue will present itself. It can be quickly resolved by just hitting ESC and reopening the menu. This is not game breaker but quite annoying and breaks the fluency in the creative process.

I am using AppImage (freshly downloaded) on Debian Stable, Gnome 3.38. I am using an AMD RX 570 and the built in video driver that comes with the kernel during Debian installation. I don't know if the CPU is relevant in this issue but it is an AMD Ryzen 3600. As I said, I'm using Gnome but the same issue was present on KDE as well when I tried it.
The same issue doesn't appear with the flatpak version however, that one crashes sometimes. The version of MuseScore in the Debian repository is still 3.2 which lacks the fancy new engraving and some other features. Because of this, I prefer the AppImage. I am not a big fan of snap so I did not consider trying that version.
The 3.6 that can be found in the Arch repo doesn't have the same issue, however, I do not fancy running a rolling distro on my production pc. I have tried building the 3.6 from source found on Github but I found it quite impossible to resolve all the dependencies (this may be easily caused by my ignorance).

This issue has been there at least ever since 3.6 came out so I am very surprised that I cannot find it in any other topics. I tried on another PC as well that has an NVidia card and I experienced the same, so I don't think the issue is with my system. Of course, if this issue has been mentioned before by someone else, I apologise, I must have overlooked it.

Any suggestion or guidance would be greatly appreciated.


Comments

I'm guessing there is an issue with the OpenGL support in your video driver, or possibly some other component that isn't incorporated with the AppImage. The AppImage is the only "supported" build of MuseScore (meaning, the only one we build and test ourselves and expect to work). Odd that it appears on two systems you have tried and no one other systems of anyone else's that I can recall being reported. Definitely doesn't happen on any of mine, also using the 3.6.2 AppImage. Making me wonder if it maybe has to do with some other piece of software you installed on both of those systems, but that most other people don't use?

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc, thank you for your swift response. Now I tried the latest version of Ubuntu, which I haven't before, and can confirm that the problem doesn't appear there. I assume the problem is probably caused by the lack of a certain piece of software, rather than the presence of it on my Debian production machine. Maybe it's the fact that Ubuntu uses a newer kernel/gpu driver. Nonetheless, I still prefer using vanilla Debian stable over Ubuntu or the other Debian releases, so I guess I'll just have to live with this for now.
By the way, I tried MuseScore4 nightly AppImage on Debian and the issue did not present itself, although I am guessing it is not yet stable enough for daily usage. So hopefully, I'll only have to put up with occasional black windows until the new version is released. I'm loving MuseScore otherwise, thank you for all your efforts!

Hi,

I have exactly the same issue (random black popups), with a new laptop running Ubuntu 22.04 and MuseScore (latest AppImage 3.6.2 version).
I can reproduce it on another computer using Linux Mint 21.

On both computers, I use the proprietary NVidia driver (I did not verified if the problem exists with built-in 'Nouveau' driver).
On both computers, the problem disappear when I switch to the MuseScore 3 ppa version (but it is an old 3.2.3 version).

Regards,

In reply to by bcourtine

Not sure how to verify for any specific driver, but the workaround would be to set the QT_OPENGL environment variable to a value that allows for software emulation. Possible values as I understand it are "desktop", "software" or "angle", and it's probably one of the latter two that you want.

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