Flatpack OBS quit working last May, system OBS still works

[Dan_Gerous]

Last January I purchased a new Lenovo desktop with Ryzen5600 processor and Nvidia RTX3060 graphics card, loaded LinuxMint Debian Edition 6 and Flatpack OBS with Droidcam. It worked fine through mid April to stream, but when I tried to open it in May - nothing. It didn't show in the task bar, process viewer showed it as a "zombie" with 0 memory used. I went back to a restore point from February and it worked. Applying the hundreds of updates (en mass), it broke again. I figured it was some glitch that would be addressed and there have been a lot of various flathub / flatpack updates since, but while other flatpack things broke for a time, most of them have been fixed. Flatpack Firefox works, Flatpack ungoogledChromium shows up in the taskbar and as a transparent hole in the screen (showing whatever desktop is behind it), and can be closed by a corner click so that isn't fully fixed yet, but it at least comes up. Flatpack OBS is still a zombie process.

Uninstalling and reinstalling flatpack OBS does nothing different. A full reload of LMDE6 from scratch and all current updates, and Flatpack OBS still fails to start. The system build 29.0.2.1-1+b1 is working fine, but I'm not keen on installing a depricated Droidcam system package to make that part work.

It's not a big deal to me at present, but knowing that all things Linux are moving away from system builds to Flatpack, it's a bug I thought should be reported. And yes, it probably is deeply rooted in a harware config error as Nvidia is known to have issues with Linux. The puzzle is why Flatpack Firefox (i'm using it to make this post) and a few other minor flatpack programs run fine.

If there is a log file for Flatpack OBS, it's buried somewhere obscure - there is no getting to it from a menu on a program that fails to start, but if someone can point me where to look, I'll check and post it if found.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dan_Gerous]

Now that I'm getting more serious on figuring this out, I removed system OBS, loaded flatpak (without the c) OBS from the software manager, and on start it DOES show up in the task bar while giving a error box "OBS did not shut down properly during your last session. Would you like to start in safe mode?"

System monitor (task manager) then shows 5 processes for OBS running at that point:

Choosing either option, the taskbar icon disappears and OBS fails to start, but it is leaving a flag of some sort that it didn't shut down properly (because it didn't open properly to give a shutdown option). The first bwrap for flatpak firefox is shown highlighted, and again, I'm using it to make this post.

 

[Dan_Gerous]

The command line to start it is

/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=obs com.obsproject.Studio

ticking the box to use a dedicated GPU in properties for the start menu and nothing shows up on start - no taskbar icon, no safe mode message, but the same 5 processes show up in resource manager.

 

[Dan_Gerous]

I've been posting about this on the LInuxMint forum as well, and they've been giving some useful debugging tips. Starting OBS in terminal with

flatpak run com.obsproject.Studio

gives

 Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
debug: Found portal inhibitor
debug: Attempted path: /app/bin/../share/obs/obs-studio/locale/en-US.ini
debug: Attempted path: /app/bin/../share/obs/obs-studio/locale.ini
debug: Attempted path: /app/bin/../share/obs/obs-studio/themes
debug: Attempted path: /app/bin/../share/obs/obs-studio/themes/
warning: org.freedesktop.portal.Settings version 1 does not support ReadOne
warning: [Safe Mode] Unclean shutdown detected!

This does put the Safe Mode warning box on screen, and choosing "start normally" gives

warning: [Safe Mode] User elected to launch normally.
info: Using EGL/X11
info: CPU Name: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics
info: CPU Speed: 4438.612MHz
info: Physical Cores: 6, Logical Cores: 12
info: Physical Memory: 15813MB Total, 2542MB Free
info: Kernel Version: Linux 6.1.0-27-amd64
info: Flatpak Branch: stable
info: Flatpak Arch: x86_64
info: Flatpak Runtime: runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.6
info: App Extensions:
info:  - com.obsproject.Studio.Locale
info: Runtime Extensions:
info:  - org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default
info:  - org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264
info:  - org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Mint-Y-Aqua
info:  - org.kde.Platform.Locale
info:  - org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default
info: Flatpak Framework Version: 1.14.10
info: Desktop Environment: X-Cinnamon (cinnamon)
info: Session Type: x11
info: Window System: X11.0, Vendor: The X.Org Foundation, Version: 1.21.1
info: Qt Version: 6.6.3 (runtime), 6.6.3 (compiled)
info: Portable mode: false
info: OBS 30.2.3 (linux)
info: ---------------------------------
info: ---------------------------------
info: audio settings reset:
    samples per sec: 48000
    speakers:        2
    max buffering:   960 milliseconds
    buffering type:  dynamically increasing
info: ---------------------------------
info: Initializing OpenGL...
libEGL warning: DRI3: Screen seems not DRI3 capable
libEGL warning: DRI2: failed to authenticate
libEGL warning: DRI3: Screen seems not DRI3 capable

The base error here seems related to freedesktop, and it's quite possible that an update in late April is what broke things, but having reloaded LMDE6 at the end of June, the update history wouldn't specify which are the likely candidates for borking things flatpak in April.

I should note that I've determined that the system does not have the Nvidia driver installed, but even with the Debian nouveau video driver, doing a GPU test from geeks3d.com says it's running at >260fps and less than 8ms, averaging about 3ms at 1080p.

 

[Dan_Gerous]

Here's the latest -
After some trepidation of a repeat of loading an Nividia driver that necessitates a revert to prior timeshift as happened before, or crashes things that video doesn't work at all and requiring a reload, I took a chance and followed the instructions exactly at linuxcapable(dot)com/install-nvidia-drivers-on-debian/ . After a reboot to load the Nvidia driver in place of the Nouveau driver and getting the dual screen setup set back up as desired, I fired up Flatpak OBS, and it works as intended.

Testing for the installed driver in terminal:

~$ nvidia-smi
Tue Nov 19 14:34:44 2024 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.183.01             Driver Version: 535.183.01   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060        On  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 31%   32C    P5              16W / 170W |    591MiB / 12288MiB |     35%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A       975      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                          305MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      1596      G   cinnamon                                     15MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      6604      G   /opt/firefox/firefox                        149MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7114    C+G   /usr/bin/celluloid                          106MiB |

I was right that the issue had to do with the Nvidia GPU. I am still puzzled by why all things Flatpak worked with the default Nouveau driver for 4 months before an update broke it, why Flatpak Firefox works with the Nouveau driver, but relieved that I've found an answer for the things that didn't.